The popular fan fiction website Archive of Our Own (AO3) went offline Thursday, and its millions of users are freaking out.
The nonprofit behind AO3, the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), initially announced Thursday that the website was down for maintenance.
But later updates revealed that the outage was more serious than routine maintenance. OTW warned that restoring the website could take at least two weeks and possibly up to four weeks.
“During that time, we may be able to bring the site back up in a degraded state, meaning that not all features will be available and/or the site may be read-only,” the update reads. “If we are able to do that, please be aware that we might have to bring the site back down unexpectedly as part of our recovery efforts.”
In its latest update, OTW revealed that it had detected evidence of a security incident on AO3 and was still in the early stages of investigating its scope.
The nonprofit said no AO3 data has been deleted, including users’ stories, bookmarks, and other content. However, it couldn’t rule out the possibility that user information had been stolen.
OTW said its user database contains information that may include usernames, email addresses, IP addresses, and hashed passwords. As a precaution, the nonprofit recommended that users change their passwords on any other websites where they use the same password as AO3.
AO3 was founded in 2008 and hosts more than 18 million fanworks, with over 11 million registered users as of this summer. The site features stories based on thousands of fandoms, including Harry Potter, Marvel Comics, and even the K-pop boy band BTS.
Unsurprisingly, fans were not too happy to hear about the prolonged outage, with many taking to social media to vent.
“Still in the early stages of investigating?? and here I’ve already reached the final stages of a total psychological collapse man😭😭,” wrote one user on X in response to the news.
“Ok… Maybe trusting a fanfic site with my entire emotional stability wasn’t my smartest move,” wrote another.
The news comes amid a series of major cybersecurity incidents this month.
Last week, developers behind PHP, a programming language used by popular website platforms including WordPress, released emergency security patches to address two critical vulnerabilities that could allow hackers to take control of vulnerable web servers.
Meanwhile, records identifying more than 41,000 Department of Homeland Security employees and contractors were leaked online this week. The data reportedly came from an Okta single sign-on system used by the agency.
For now, OTW says it is still investigating the security incident and will provide further updates as more information becomes available.
