Archive of Our Own Down for Maintenance, Recovery Could Take Weeks

Archive of Our Own (AO3), a major fan fiction website, is currently down for maintenance, and the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) says service restoration could take around two weeks and possibly up to four weeks. The nonprofit says the site's data is intact, but it has not explained what is causing the lengthy outage.

What the OTW has said

The OTW took AO3 offline just after 3 a.m. ET and originally planned to keep it down for only 12 hours, according to its status page. It now estimates that restoring service will take around two weeks, but could take up to four weeks, and says it is hopeful it can bring the site back in a degraded state sooner. If that happens, the site may need to be taken down temporarily until the issue is fully resolved.

Site data and recent problems

AO3 hosts millions of transformative fanworks based on existing books, movies, TV shows and more, and likely serves millions more readers. 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. The OTW logged problems with email notifications, search, history and listings between October 23 and 24, but has not elaborated on the issues it is dealing with now.

Security context and staffing

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 has not given any indication it is dealing with those same problems on AO3. 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, and said it will update its article if it hears back.

Sources: Engadget · 404 Media