Early on Monday morning, it became clear that any attempt to access the news archives of LiverpoolFC.com to find stories published on August 31st leads readers to a redirect page apologizing for high traffic on the site and asking them to try again later. Disappointingly, this appears to be an attempt to make it difficult to access stories published on the official site on transfer deadline day rather than being a genuine case of the site being overloaded due to high traffic volume.
"Due to the high volume of site activity," reads the redirect message, "this page is currently unavailable. Please try again later."
As of the time of writing, however, we at the Liverpool Offside have inquired with multiple sources who confirm that this redirect and error message is only encountered in very specific circumstances—and that in those circumstances the error message is always encountered. These include attempts to search for news items, attempts to read past page one of the news or latest news archives—with the news archives only showing stories published up to August 30th and latest news only showing ones published after September 1st—and searches for stories using the site's tag system.
Despite our best efforts, we could not get any link or page anywhere else on the club's official website to offer up a similar error. This is in stark contrast to our efforts to access the archives for news stories from August 31st, where we ran into the same error message 100% of the time.
News stories from transfer deadline day can still be reached through Google if one knows what to search for, such as a piece from early on Friday where Brendan Rodgers talks of the "need to add goals to the team" before the end of the day, so at least the club has not attempted to scrub all evidence of what was said on the day. However, there does appear to be a an effort to at least make it difficult for fans to find stories published on the official website on Friday, August 31st.
If you want to dig through the archives for yourself and see if you can get the club's official site to show you anything from transfer deadline day, you can find them here.