Archive of Our Own Goes Dark for Up to Four Weeks After Security Breach
Archive of Our Own, the fan fiction site that hosts 18 million stories, is offline and could stay that way for up to four weeks. The Organization for Transformative Works, the group that runs it, says the site will be down for at least two weeks.
Fan fiction is stories written by readers and set in the worlds of existing books, films, television shows and games. Archive of Our Own, usually called AO3, is one of the largest places to publish and read them, and it is free to use.
The site went down in late October. Its operators first expected the work to take at least 12 hours. That estimate has since been overtaken by a much longer timetable.
The organisation says the outage involved a security breach. It also says the breach has no connection to flaws in PHP, a programming language used to build websites, which shut down many other sites. Those flaws are a separate problem, the organisation said.
On the question most users will ask first, the answer is reassuring. The organisation says no Archive of Our Own data has been deleted. Stories and accounts are not gone, only out of reach for now.
That matters because the archive works like a public library with the doors shut. Anyone can walk in, pick up a story and read it at no cost, so a closure is felt by everyone who relied on it at once. Writers, too, have lost their usual place to post, and readers have lost the stories they go back to.
Nothing about the reopening date is certain beyond the range the organisation has given. Its own timetable runs from a minimum of two weeks to a possible four. Until then, the shelves stay closed, and the 18 million stories wait behind a locked door.
