Fan fiction site AO3 is offline, and restoration may take up to four weeks

Archive of Our Own (AO3), one of the best-known websites for publishing and reading fan fiction, is currently unavailable. The nonprofit Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), which founded AO3, took the site offline. It first expected maintenance to last 12 hours, but now warns that the work could stretch to several weeks.

The site was shut down shortly after 3 a.m. Eastern Time. According to the OTW's status page, restoring service will probably take about two weeks, though it could take up to four. The organization hopes to bring the site back sooner in a limited state, but says it may then have to go offline again briefly until the problem is fully resolved.

Data reportedly intact

AO3 hosts millions of fan works based on existing books, films, TV series and other material. A former AO3 volunteer who moderates the r/AO3 forum says the OTW has stated that the site's data is intact, which should mean the stories are safe.

Cause unclear

What triggered such a long outage is not known. The OTW recorded problems with email notifications, search, history and listings on October 23 and 24, but has not explained the issues it is handling now.

Over the past two weeks, two serious security vulnerabilities, one in the PHP scripting language and one in TLS certificates, forced some websites offline so they could be patched. Another OTW site, Fanlore, was briefly shut down because of the PHP flaw. There is no indication that AO3 is dealing with the same problems.

The OTW's engineers are volunteers rather than paid staff, which may slow the rollout of fixes. Engadget has asked the OTW to comment on the outage and the maintenance work being carried out.