Fan Fiction Site Archive of Our Own Goes Offline After Security Incident
The popular fan fiction website Archive of Our Own (AO3) was taken down on October 29 for maintenance following a security incident, and full restoration could take up to four weeks. Fans are compiling downloaded stories, and users are urged to change their passwords.
Archive of Our Own, better known as AO3, a major website for fan fiction, went offline on October 29. A site administrator posted that it was down for maintenance and that full restoration could take up to four weeks. The site might return sooner in a "degraded state" with some features disabled. For its users, this means a prolonged loss of access to millions of works.
The first statement did not give a reason, but later updates said a security incident had occurred. The operators said they were still in the early stages of responding and were determining its scope. They said they did not believe the user database had been stolen, but urged users to be cautious and change their passwords for the site.
About the site
AO3 is run by the Organization for Transformative Works, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving fandom communities online. It was founded in 2007, partly out of concern about censorship and corporate interests taking over fandom spaces. According to a 2026 press release, it has 11 million users and hosts more than 18 million original works. Last year, the gay hockey romance TV series Heated Rivalry brought a surge of interest, with tens of thousands of stories about its main characters, Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov, published on the platform.
Fan reaction
Users turned to social media for help; one Heated Rivalry fan account on X tagged not only AO3 but also the FBI, the CIA and Uber Support. Others are assembling Google Docs with links to downloaded stories, calling them "survival guides" for the "AO3 apocalypse" and sorting them by character pairings. One such document is hard to open because of heavy traffic.
Some users noted that the outage coincides with "No Nut November," an online challenge encouraging abstinence from masturbation for the month. The Organization for Transformative Works did not immediately respond to Wired's request for comment. The publication notes that the episode highlights the prominence of fan fiction, which influences publishing trends, draws hundreds of millions of views and feeds the growing vertical video industry.
