Archive of Our Own, one of the world's biggest fanfiction sites, went down hard.

October has been a rocky month for readers of the fan-run fiction site Archive of Our Own, popularly known as AO3. Now, a routine disruption has escalated into a crisis. What began as an estimated 12-hour unplanned outage has ballooned into a multi-week shutdown, leaving millions of users locked out of the site following a series of intermittent disruptions throughout the month.

An update posted Thursday to the site’s status page and shared via Bluesky and Tumblr said that service restoration will take at least two weeks, possibly four. It went on to say: “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.”

[update] Identified: We estimate that service restoration for #AO3 will take around 2 weeks but it could be up to 4 weeks. 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 …

That update followed an initial notification, 12 hours earlier, with the estimate “AO3 maintenance is in progress. We expect it to take at least 12 hours, but it may take longer.”

An Archive of Our Own representative didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

While it’s possible the outage is related to the web-wide PHP patch emergency from earlier this month, the Organization for Transformative Works patched its sister site, Fanlore, on Oct.

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