AO3 outage could last two to four weeks

Archive of Our Own, also known as AO3, is facing a major outage that could keep the fanfiction site offline for at least a few weeks. The Organization for Transformative Works, which runs the archive, says what first looked like a short problem may now take two to four weeks to fix.

AO3 is a major part of fandom culture and is known for hosting a huge range of fan-created stories for free, all maintained by volunteers. With the site down, many users have been reacting online to the unexpected downtime.

The archive has had outages before. In 2023, a hacktivist group said it was behind a DDoS attack that took the site offline for several hours and reportedly demanded ransom. The reason for this longer outage has not been explained in the source.