Fan fiction website AO3 is down, and it could take weeks to recover

The site's data is reportedly intact, but the cause of the outage is still unknown.

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Archive of Our Own (AO3), one of the best-known homes for people who read and write fan fiction online, is currently down for maintenance. The Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), the nonprofit that founded AO3, took the site offline just after 3AM ET and originally planned to keep it down for only 12 hours, per its status page, but now says maintenance could take weeks.

"We estimate that service restoration for #AO3 will take around 2 weeks but it could be up to 4 weeks," the OTW says. "We are hopeful that we will be able to bring the site back up in a degraded state sooner. If that does happen, there may be times when the site has to be brought down temporarily until this is fully resolved. Please stay tuned for further info."

AO3 hosts millions of transformative fanworks based on existing books, movies, TV shows and more, and likely serves millions more readers who want to read stories about their favorite characters and worlds. The OTW has said the site's data is intact, according to a former AO3 volunteer who moderates r/AO3, which should mean those stories are safe. What's less clear is what caused this lengthy outage.

The OTW logged problems with email notifications, search, history and listings between October 23 and 24, but hasn't elaborated on what issues it's dealing with now. In the last two weeks, two major security vulnerabilities, one found in the PHP scripting language and another found in TLS certificates, have forced some websites to go offline to patch and protect themselves. That includes another OTW site, Fanlore, which was briefly shut down to deal with the PHP flaw. The nonprofit hasn't given any indication it's dealing with those same problems on AO3. Whatever the cause, though, the OTW's engineers are volunteers rather than paid staff, which might make fixes take longer to implement.

Engadget asked the OTW to comment on the outage and share what maintenance work is being done. We'll update this article if we hear back.