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Archive of our Own (AO3), the popular site where fans publish and read stories about their favorite characters and worlds, has bad news for its community. After going offline for what was supposed to be routine overnight maintenance, the site says it could stay online for almost a whole month.
AO3 did not initially share details about what caused the outage, but published a longer statement hours after announcing that the site would likely be down for two to four weeks.
“Earlier today, we detected evidence of a security incident on AO3,” the statement reads. “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.”
AO3 is a project of the nonprofit Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), which relies on volunteers and donations to keep the site afloat. The site has such a passionate user base that, within two hours of the announcement that it would go offline, its status page’s posts had garnered millions of views (and much panicked commentary) across social media.
We estimate that service restoration for #AO3 will take around 2 weeks but it could be up to 4 weeks. We are hopeful that we will be able to bring the site back up in a degraded state sooner. Refer to our status page for updates: https://t.co/YAyyoTDOpE https://t.co/PUWaHF9M8L
“While we currently don’t believe that the user database was stolen, we are also unable to rule it out. The AO3 database contains account information that may include your username, email address, IP address, and a hashed version of your password,” the OTW added.
Though AO3 stores user passwords by using an industry-standard hashing technique, the site recommended that as a precaution, users should change their passwords on any other sites where they may have used the same password.
Some fans may suspect this issue is related to last week’s “PHP Armageddon,” when tools from OpenAI and Google Wiz uncovered two critical flaws in PHP, the programming language that runs the behind-the-scenes software of about 70% of the internet. But AO3 is not among that majority. Instead, the site is built on a different framework (a toolkit for running websites), Ruby on Rails, so the outage is unlikely to be related.
OTW and AO3 did not reply to requests for comment.
Updated, 10/29/26, 9:45 PM ET, after OTW published a statement about the nature of the outage.
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