AO3 may be down for up to four weeks
The site's data is reportedly intact, but the cause of the outage has not been disclosed.
30 Oct 2026 0 reads Compiled with AI
Archive of Our Own (AO3), the nonprofit-run fan fiction site that hosts over 18.4 million works, went down early Thursday for what was announced as routine maintenance. Hours later, the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) said the outage would last at least 12 hours. Later that day it said the site would likely be down for around two weeks, and possibly up to a month.
The OTW said, "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." It added that it could not rule out theft of the user database, but it did not believe that data had been stolen. The site's data is reportedly intact. It recommended that users change their passwords on any other sites where they may have used the same password.
OTW estimated that service restoration would take roughly two weeks but could take up to four weeks. It hopes to bring the site back up in a degraded state sooner. The nonprofit's engineers are volunteers, which may lengthen the repair timeline. The status page warned that brief outages may still happen while the issue is fully resolved.
The cause of the outage remains unclear. The PHP flaws that briefly shut down another OTW site, Fanlore, are unlikely to be involved, because AO3 is built on Ruby on Rails rather than PHP. OTW has yet to disclose a specific problem behind the extended maintenance.