Surfacing here for people who like to read comments before clicking through to the article.
TLDR: the site owner was returning wrong DNS responses for people using Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 DNS service because the site owner doesn't like Cloudflare.
Or you can try to not imagine everyone as hating everything and read the other comment in here posting the archive.* side of the story.
> There have been numerous attacks where people upload illegal content (childporn or isis propaganda) and immediately reported to the authorities near the IP of the archive. It resulted in ceased servers and downtimes. I just have no time to react. So I developed sort of CDN, with the only difference: DNS server returns not the closest IP to the request origin but the closest IP abroad, so any takedown procedure would require bureaucratic procedures so I am getting notified notified and have time to react.
> But CloudFlare DNS disrupts the scheme together with all other DNS-based CDNs Cloudflare is competing with and puts the archive existence on risk. I offered them to proxy those CloudFlare DNS's users via their CDN but they rejected. Registering my own autonomous system just to fix the issue with CloudFlare DNS is too expensive for me.