There are frequent reminders that things on the internet aren’t permanent. Web content and online services are sometimes here today and gone tomorrow.
For instance, earlier this month TV Time, a tracking app for TV shows and movies, announced that it is shutting down on July 15. When that happens, all personal user data will be deleted.
TV Time has operated for more than a decade and built a dedicated community around episode tracking, watchlists and user ratings. But TV Time said the service is “no longer sustainable.” (See article by MacRumors.)
But all is not lost in this case. Rival services including JustWatch, Serializd and Trakt are offering migration tools for TV Time users to transfer their viewing history, watchlists and episode-tracking data to their platforms.
In May, ABC News purged the archives of respected data journalism website FiveThirtyEight and set up mass redirects to the generic politics section of ABCNews.com. The move took down thousands of articles dating back to the website’s founding in 2008.
ABC bought FiveThirtyEight, known for its data-driven analyses of elections, sports and other subjects, in April 2018.
The abrupt takedown drew heavy criticism from former editors, data journalists, and historians who viewed it as a massive blow to the preservation of public data and political history. (See article by the New York Times.)
A bigger data deletion occurred on Sept. 30, 2025, when blogging platform Typepad went dark after 22 years of service. Typepad announced its planned closure in late August 2025.
Users were given just over a month's notice to manually export decades worth of content before the servers were permanently deactivated and all unexported blogs were wiped out.
Also in May, search engine Ask.com quietly shut down after almost 30 years in operation. It launched in 1996 – a year before Google, which ultimately became the dominant search engine.
Ask.com “follows a spate of Y2K sites to the digital graveyard as AI bots take over the query space,” Sherwood News wrote.
Photos: Screenshots of TV Time and Ask.com.
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