AO3 Will Be Down For Weeks
Archive of Our Own, the popular fan fiction archive better known to users simply as "AO3," is down for maintenance. According to a statement, the site will not be fully online and function for two to four weeks following a "security incident."
The move has left fan fiction writers and readers somewhat high and dry, since AO3 is constantly evolving and therefore difficult to meaningfully archive to third-party sites like the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.
The plan was originally to get the site back up and running in a matter of hours, but a later announcement pushed the roadmap out to two to four weeks, indicating that they would rather be safe than fast. It's an approach that runs counter to a controversy currently plaguing the ostensibly-secure web suite Proton, whose CEO has gone all-in on AI. Whistleblowers claim has dismissed recent privacy concerns by engineers at the organization.
The site has already been down for days, but following the weekend, a number of pop culture sites and even some straight news like NBC covered the situation, which has strengthened some community bonds as users on social media have started assembling tutorials and threads that will allow fans to read and share their favorite stories even with the website out of commission.
The Organization for Transformative Works, the nonprofit behind AO3, assured users that no content has been deleted. There is no indication yet who, if anyone, hacked the website, although given the recent attacks on Cara by content thieves using large language models, it wouldn't be surprising to learn that AI bros are behind the outage, to one extent or another.
Archive of Our Own was founded in 2008 in response to the rise and fall of FanLib, a site that aimed to monetize fan fiction. In the years since, it has become the internet's preeminent source for English-language fan fiction, and one of a relatively small number of popular fan fiction sites that allow and encourage "spicy" content.
“AO3 and the OTW were founded by fans, for fans. That ethos remains at the heart of our mission today, and we love seeing how fans mobilize and support one another, both through and beyond AO3,” a spokesperson for the Organization For Transformative Works said in a statement. “As fan[s] ourselves, we deeply empathize with the frustration and despair of losing access to AO3—and we’re heartened by the creativity, humor, and sense of community reflected in the flood of memes.”
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