A global relay campaign, with the sole purpose of rescuing the Chinese internet from twenty years ago.

PS. According to what Shi Chao has learned, the popular posts on Tieba at present are not published by participating personnel. The project has sufficient manpower, and the rescue work has entered the stage of integration and archiving. Blind operation will affect the project progress, and we hope everyone stays calm.

September 16, 2026. Hundreds of netizens sat in front of their computers, staring at the constantly jumping task numbers.

They come from all over the world and may not even know each other. But they collectively carried out the largest rescue operation on the Chinese Internet in 2026.

Someone named this operation: Sina Cloud Complementation Plan.

The whole cause is that Sina Cloud announced that it will go offline and permanently terminate all services at 24:00 on September 16. Users' stored data will be permanently deleted after the shutdown.

A month before the shutdown, the Save The Web Project, an organization dedicated to Chinese data rescue, noticed this situation immediately and launched a data rescue plan and volunteer recruitment.

Later, the international organization ArchiveTeam also listed the Sina Video rescue as an urgent priority project, recruiting volunteers to continuously rescue video data.

In the past two months, the news spread to Tieba and many other places, and more and more people joined in.

All netizens who saw the news tacitly joined the rescue spontaneously.

Some offered manpower, some contributed resources. Some people even deleted their own files to free up space, making room for videos left by strange netizens more than ten years ago.

We emphasize again that the rescue plan has been completed for the current phase, and blind participation will interfere with the follow-up progress

Why would so many people volunteer to join when a small cloud service is shut down? What consequences will there be if the data cannot be rescued?

Many readers may only know about Alibaba Cloud, Huawei Cloud and other similar services. In fact, Sina Cloud is China's first public PaaS (Platform as a Service) cloud computing platform, which was launched as early as 2009.

If you learned PHP and developed Weibo applications around 2010, you will probably have a strong sense of familiarity when you see the domain name sinaapp.com below.

In the early days, thanks to its low cost and no need for operation and maintenance, Sina Cloud became the first choice for many small developers. It once gathered millions of developers and hosted nearly ten million applications.

At that time, many people used Sina Cloud to build personal websites, develop small games and so on.

The mini game Micro Three Kingdoms launched on Sina Cloud in the early days

But if the impact only spreads to these people, the consequence will not be that serious. More importantly, as one of the four major portal websites in the early stage, Sina stores a huge amount of Chinese Internet content.

Some netizens made a very vivid meme: Sina website is a more mysterious place than the dark web.

Many old services and data of Sina Video are still stored on Sina Cloud.

If this part of the data is lost one after another as the server shuts down later, we will no longer be able to log in and retrieve it. The post-90s and post-00s generations will collectively lose a part of their memories.

Numerous long-forgotten old TV programs, teaching videos and other content on the Chinese Internet will become invalid links that cannot be loaded.

How serious could the situation be exactly? I will tell you what is stored in it, and then you will understand.

In the early days, many TV stations, news portals and netizens would prefer to upload videos and programs to Sina. For example, the show Yue Ce Yue Kai Xin that Shi Chao loved to watch when he was a child, some unique programs of local TV stations, recorded materials of Deyun Society and so on.

CCTV has a particularly rich collection of resources on it, ranging from Xinwen Lianbo, various documentaries, operas, investigation programs, star interviews to music awards ceremonies and all kinds of other programs.

For example, the early episodes of News Probe cannot even be found on the official website of CCTV, you can only find them on Sina website.

There are even many mysterious ancient news program clips on Sina whose country and language cannot be identified. These videos may no longer be found in the local TV station's own library, but Sina still has archives of them.

Moreover, it is not only TV programs that will be affected.

Ancient out-of-print games, software patches, early courseware and experimental teaching videos of many schools, or interactive teaching courseware, and even school homepages, are mostly stored on it.

The Sina PS teaching zone in those days

A classic series of videos

We veteran ACG fans will also be greatly affected.

The well-known early Bilibili masterpieces such as Jin Kela, Blue Road and a series of other classic old works may disappear as the servers shut down.

Because Bilibili and AcFun did not have their own video storage servers, many videos before 2015 were hosted on Sina, and the source videos were stored in Sina Cloud.

Although Bilibili immediately migrated all its data after it had sufficient funds, many old Bilibili videos became invalid one after another for various reasons.

In the past, people could go to Sina to find the source videos, but now we can never go back to that time.

The more prosperous it used to be, the wider the scope of impact after its decline.

After 2015, the cloud computing market was gradually dominated by IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service). Alibaba Cloud and Huawei Cloud occupy the mainstream of the market, and Sina Cloud has gradually become a marginalized product.

When the news of shutdown came out in March, many people didn't even notice it at all.

Fortunately, professional teams quickly started the rescue work.

On August 14, the Chinese data rescue organization Save The Web Project officially launched an archive project called Sina Video, and released the task on GitHub.

Netizens acted very quickly. It only took 12 days to urgently rescue nearly 942,000 early Bilibili related videos, totaling 28.9 TiB.

But Bilibili related videos are only a small part of the data in Sina Video. When SWTP was preparing to continue saving data, a netizen named hw contacted Archive Team and launched a special Sina project, which greatly accelerated the speed of the rescue plan.

Archive Team is a global non-governmental data rescue organization founded in 2009, dedicated to rescuing endangered data around the world.

Many abandoned products such as Yahoo Answers and Vine were finally captured bit by bit by Archive Team.

It is non-profit and survives on volunteers and donations from all over the world. Although it does not have a strict organizational structure, it has a mature workflow.

Data that may be deleted around the world will be sorted out according to priority and published on its official website.

As you can see, Sina is on the first line of the urgent task list. Along with it are South Korean video website Naver TV and free website building tool Weebly.

In other projects, Voice of America, GitHub, YouTube, Meta's ad library are all being captured one after another.

Even personal websites whose deceased owners cannot afford the operating costs will be backed up by them