Archive of Our Own Offline After Security Incident; Restoration Could Take Up to Four Weeks

Archive of Our Own (AO3), the nonprofit fan-fiction archive, is expected to stay offline for at least two weeks after its operator detected a security incident, the Organization for Transformative Works said late on October 29. The organization said restoring the site could take as long as four weeks.

From maintenance to security incident

The outage began early on Thursday, October 29. The OTW's status page first reported at 07:13 UTC that AO3 was "down for maintenance." Two hours later it said the work would take at least 12 hours. At 17:41 UTC it estimated that service restoration would take around two weeks and could take up to four, and said it hoped to bring the site back sooner in a reduced form.

The cause was not disclosed until an update posted at 01:27 UTC on October 30, early Thursday evening in the United States. "Earlier today, we detected evidence of a security incident on AO3," the organization wrote, adding that it was "still in the early stages" of determining the incident's scope and that the site would remain down while the investigation continued. That update did not say what kind of incident it was, how it was spotted, or who might be behind it.

What the OTW says is and is not at risk

The organization said no AO3 data had been deleted and that works, bookmarks and kudos were safe.

It was less definite about account data. "While we currently don't believe that the user database was stolen, we are also unable to rule it out," the update said. According to the OTW, the database holds usernames, email addresses, IP addresses and hashed passwords. It said it uses industry-standard password hashing but noted that "no hashing method can fully protect a weak or reused password from being cracked," and it advised account holders to change their passwords on any other site where they had used the same password as on AO3.

AO3 does not collect real names, the OTW said. Donor information is held in a separate system that is never linked to AO3 and has not been exposed, according to the update.

What happens next

The OTW said the archive might return in a "degraded state" before full recovery, with some features unavailable or the site limited to reading only, and that it might have to take the site down again without warning during the recovery. It said it may be unable to answer individual questions and would post further updates through its official channels.

AO3 is a major home for fan fiction: 404 Media reported that as of September it hosted more than 18.4 million works across more than 82,900 fandoms. The outage runs into November, a month in which many fiction writers take part in month-long drafting challenges, and authors who publish on the archive cannot reach their posted work until it returns. The OTW said the works themselves remain intact.

Sources

• Organization for Transformative Works, October 30, 2026: Update on AO3 Downtime, October 30, 2026
• OTW status page: AO3 Down for Maintenance (incident history)
• 404 Media, October 29, 2026: Massive Fanfic Site Archive of Our Own Says It's Going Down for 'Up to 4 Weeks'

Photo: Server racks in a data center (illustrative; not AO3's equipment). Photo by Carl Lender, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY 2.0.