Archive of Our Own (AO3), a massive repository for fanfiction and creative writing, might be down for as long as a month after going down for "maintenance" on Thursday.
The Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), the non-profit organization that runs AO3, posted on its status page early Thursday morning that the site was down for maintenance. A few hours later, it updated the status to say that it was expected to take at least 12 hours. By Thursday afternoon, it said the site restoration will take around two weeks, but could take up to a month.
“We are hopeful that we will be able to bring the site back up in a degraded state sooner. If that does happen, there may be times when the site has to be brought down temporarily until this is fully resolved. Please stay tuned for further info,” OTW wrote.
It’s difficult to overstate the importance of AO3 to fan culture, fanfiction writers and readers, and its influence on internet culture in general. As of September, the open-source fanfic repository hosted over 18.4 million works spanning over 82,900 fandoms. This status update means AO3 is expected to be down during much of hoa hoa hoa season, most of ACOTAR new book release week, and on the cusp of the month formerly known as NaNoWriMo. If you were going as Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way for Halloween, you are in our thoughts. And if you have something to share about AO3’s extended shutdown and how it will affect the fanfic community, I'd love to hear from you: sam@404media.co.
