It's come up on HN a bunch, including recently. I'm not sure how to find the threads.
It is weird and confusing, and has to do with the fact, if i remember right, that the Archive.today maintainer is mad that Cloudflare won't forward end-user IP addresses with DNS queries.
This seems mysterious, but one other comment pointed out the maintainer saying that this prevents the maintainer from assigning traffic to servers the way they want, which is an odd way having to do with legal systems and national boundaries and maybe trying to send the user to a CDN endpoint _not_ in their own nation for some reason?
If I'm remembering right.
The whole thing is weird and I can't explain it, and is very under-documented, the archive.today maintainer apparently doesn't really like talking about it or explaining it?
But basically archive.today intentionally deny-lists anyone using cloudflare DNS in a way that results in very mysterious behaivor where you don't know you are denylisted, including infinite captchas.
I have had the same issue with Google 8.8.8.8 DNS and archive.today btw.
I've also found they do very suspicious things in those captcha pages as well, such as sending random requests to unrelated websites (feels like a DDoS at that point). I've been avoiding archive.today links ever since.
For me, archive.ph always shows an insolvable captcha (the page reloads after submitting the captcha in a never ending loop).