The world of fan fiction is bracing for an apocalypse as one the world’s largest repositories of fan-written stories has gone dark—and may not return anytime soon.

The panic began on October 29 when Archive of Our Own (AO3), the online library for fan-created stories ranging from Harry Potter and Heated Rivalry to K-pop and boy band fandoms, announced it would take the site offline for maintenance.

The website housed around 18.8 million stories across thousands of fandoms, and is operated by a nonprofit called the Organization for Transformative Works, run entirely by volunteers.

The original announcement suggested the site would be down for around 12 hours, but a few hours later, an update announced an even longer hiatus.

“We estimate that service restoration for #AO3 will take around 2 weeks but it could be up to 4 weeks,” the update said.

Users were quick to express their frustrations through humor, taking to other platforms like X and Tumblr—another popular platform for fan fiction—to poke fun at the situation.

One user wrote on X, “all of the countries preparing for outages told us to buy water and canned food but we didn’t think of downloading a month’s worth of ao3 for this.”

AO3 is using an update page, Tumblr, and Bluesky to communicate with users. A day after it announced the extended timeline for coming back online, it further announced that it had detected a “security incident” on the site.

Specifics on the incident have not been revealed, although the update also said the team was working on determining its scope.

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