October has been a rocky month for readers of the fan-run fiction site Archive of Our Own, popularly known as AO3. Now, a routine disruption has escalated into a crisis. What began as an estimated 12-hour unplanned outage has ballooned into a multi-week shutdown, leaving millions of users locked out of the site following a series of intermittent disruptions throughout the month. An outage of this magnitude hit readers out of nowhere, landing with all the subtlety of a Looney Tunes anvil.
The platform is operated by the Organization for Transformative Works. An update posted Thursday to the site’s status page and shared via Bluesky and Tumblr said that service restoration will take at least two weeks, possibly four.
“We are hopeful that we will be able to bring the site back up in a degraded state sooner,” the update said. “If that does happen, there may be times when the site has to be brought down temporarily until this is fully resolved.”
That update followed an initial notification, 12 hours earlier, with the announcement that “AO3 maintenance is in progress. We expect it to take at least 12 hours, but it may take longer.”
In response to a CNET request for more information, an OTW representative pointed to a new status update, saying, “The statement confirms that the downtime is a security incident, the scope of which is still being assessed. I can let you know that this is not related to the PHP security issue as the Archive uses Ruby on Rails.”
According to the update, “Earlier today, we detected evidence of a security incident on AO3. We are still in the early stages of response to this security incident and determining its scope. AO3 will remain down while we continue investigating and addressing what has been found so far.”
It emphasizes that no data has been deleted, and while they don’t think user data was compromised, they can’t rule it out and recommend you change your password if it’s not unique to AO3. (It should be if you practice safe password practices.) Donor information resides in a separate, unconnected database.
If you need a stopgap for your fanfic needs, you can try Wattpad or FanFiction. The r/DeletedFanfiction Reddit, Bluesky members and other communities have stepped up to offer copies of works they’d already downloaded and to crowdsource alternatives.
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