The Great AO3 Outage of 2026: Archive of Our Own Goes Offline Following Potential Security Breach

Popular fanfiction platform Archive of Our Own (AO3) has gone offline following the discovery of a potential security incident, with operators warning that restoring full service could take between two and four weeks.

The non-profit website, which was created in 2008 by the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) and hosts over 18.4 million fanworks across 82,900 fandoms, originally went down for scheduled maintenance early Thursday morning. However, subsequent status updates confirmed that the platform will remain offline for the time being while volunteer engineers investigate the scope of an internal security event.

In an official statement released on Friday, October 30th, AO3 clarified the status of user data and confirmed that all creative works remain intact:

“Earlier today, we detected evidence of a security incident on AO3. We are still in the early stages of response to this security incident and determining its scope. AO3 will remain down while we continue investigating and addressing what has been found so far. However, we want to make some things clear:

First, no AO3 data has been deleted. All your works, bookmarks, kudos, etc., are safe.

Second, while we currently don't believe that the user database was stolen, we are also unable to rule it out. The AO3 database contains account information that may include your username, email address, IP address, and a hashed version of your password…

…AO3 does not collect real names, so none could be exposed. Additionally, our donor information is held in an entirely separate system and is never linked to AO3, so that data has also not been exposed.”

The site's engineering team explained that while they are attempting to bring the platform back online in a limited capacity as soon as possible, full restoration will require extended technical work:

"Our current expectation is that AO3 will be down for a minimum of two weeks; however, it could take up to four weeks. During that time, we may be able to bring the site back up in a degraded state, meaning that not all features will be available and/or the site may be read-only. If we are able to do that, please be aware that we might have to bring the site back down unexpectedly as part of our recovery efforts. We will keep you in the loop for any developments."

The announcement triggered widespread reactions across social media from readers and writers, many of whom rely on the open-source platform as a creative hub and digital community space, particularly within LGBTQ+ groups.

Alternative publishing platforms acknowledged the outage on social media, with competing site Wattpad posting:

“We’re here to support you during this difficult time.”

Because AO3 is maintained entirely by volunteer staff rather than paid technical teams, site administrators urged users to monitor official status channels on Tumblr, Bluesky, and their dedicated status page while the security audit continues. In the interim, users seeking specific archived stories have been utilizing third-party web preservation tools like the Wayback Machine to access saved links, and have been creating Google Drives to share the stories they have downloaded with others.