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Fan fiction site AO3 may stay offline for 4 weeks

Published

The Archive of Our Own (AO3) went offline on Thursday after its operator, the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), found evidence of a security incident. OTW said it cannot rule out that the user database was stolen.

OTW first called the outage maintenance and said the work would take at least 12 hours. Later it said restoring the site could take around two weeks, with up to four weeks possible. OTW said it was still working out how far the damage goes.

OTW said no data was deleted, so works, comments, kudos and bookmarks are safe. It said the user database holds user names, email addresses, IP addresses and hashed versions of passwords. OTW said it does not currently believe the database was stolen.

OTW hopes to bring back a degraded version of the site sooner, possibly read-only. It said it might have to take the site down again without warning. Reports said AO3 hosted 18.4 million works as of September.

Key facts

Who
Archive of Our Own (fan-fiction website that announced the security incident); OTW (nonprofit that runs AO3); AO3 (fan fiction archive that went offline); Organization for Transformative Works (nonprofit that runs Archive of Our Own (AO3))
What
AO3 announced a security incident that could keep the fan-fiction site offline for up to four weeks. The description says its status page posts drew millions of views within two hours of the announcement.
When
29 October 2026
Status
Reported

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