Fan-fiction site Archive of Our Own could be offline for up to 4 weeks

Archive of our Own (AO3), the popular site where fans publish and read stories about their favorite characters and worlds, has bad news for its community. After going offline for what was supposed to be routine overnight maintenance, the site says it could stay online for almost a whole month.

“We estimate that service restoration for AO3 will take around 2 weeks but it could be up to 4 weeks,” the AO3 status page says. “We are hopeful that we will be able to bring the site back up in a degraded state sooner.”

AO3 is a project of the nonprofit Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), which relies on volunteers and donations to keep the site afloat. The site has such a passionate user base that, within two hours of the announcement, its status page’s posts had garnered millions of views (and much panicked commentary) across social media.

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. Refer to our status page for updates: https://t.co/YAyyoTDOpE https://t.co/PUWaHF9M8L

Some fans may suspect this issue is related to last week’s “PHP Armageddon,” when tools from OpenAI and Google Wiz uncovered two critical flaws in PHP, the programming language that runs the behind-the-scenes software of about 70% of the internet. But AO3 is not among that majority. Instead, the site is built on a different framework (a toolkit for running websites), Ruby on Rails, so the outage is unlikely to be related.

OTW and AO3 did not immediately reply to requests for comment. We’ll update this article if we learn more.

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