One of the world’s most popular fan-fiction libraries has been dark for more than a week after a cyberattack forced it offline, leaving millions of readers and writers without access to their favourite stories. Since October 29, anyone trying to reach Archive of Our Own, known to its users as AO3, has been met with a message saying the site is down for maintenance.
What was first expected to last about twelve hours has turned into a much longer outage. An update posted hours after the site went down estimated that restoring full service would instead take two weeks, or potentially up to four. The non-profit that runs the site says it now hopes to have things running again within a month.
AO3 is the main home of fan fiction, stories written by amateur authors using characters and worlds from books, films, television shows and games. The archive holds nearly 18 million works and has more than 11 million registered users, with large and dedicated communities reworking figures from sources including Marvel, Harry Potter and the Japanese manga series My Hero Academia.
The Organization for Transformative Works, the non-profit that operates the site, says the outage was caused by a security breach that is still under investigation. It says no stories, bookmarks or Kudos, the site’s version of likes, were deleted in the attack. It also says it does not believe the user database, which holds usernames, email addresses and encrypted passwords, was stolen, but it cannot rule that out.
A volunteer-run site under strain
Naomi Novik, one of AO3’s co-founders, said she felt a sense of resignation when she learned of the hack. She noted that dealing with security breaches is harder for a volunteer-run operation like AO3 than for a large commercial company, and said the team has confirmed that the stories posted to the site have not been deleted.
Users have been distraught at the prospect of a month without reading, or adding to, the archive’s vast collection. In the days after the site went down, several copycat platforms appeared with near-total copies of the archive, including, some users said, stories that had never been published and others that had been deleted. One such site, called AO3.life, appeared on November 1, three days after the hack.
For many readers and writers, the outage has underlined how much of their creative life depends on a single non-profit platform. The operators say there is no data loss and they look forward to restoring the site as soon as possible. Until then, millions of fans are waiting for the library that holds their stories to come back online.
