AO3 Is Down for Weeks. Its Stories Did Not Stay Put.

– A (CHOSEN, two-sentence): AO3 Is Down for Weeks. Its Stories Did Not Stay Put. – B (rejected, single-statement — would make three consecutive singles): The AO3 Outage Scattered 18.8 Million Stories Across the Web’s Spare Copies – C (rejected, colon head in 8-window): AO3 Is Down: The Wayback Machine, the Drive Folders and the Fake Archive – D (rejected, question head in 8-window): AO3 Is Down for Weeks. Where Are Its 18.8 Million Stories Now? – E (rejected, number-led head in 8-window): 18.8 Million Works, No Archive: How AO3’s Readers Rebuilt It in a Week

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Paste the address of a story into the Wayback Machine, and a saved copy of the page will usually load, frozen at the last visit the crawler made. The page looks like the archive, minus the parts that made it the archive: no new chapters, no comments, no kudos, and nothing posted after the last snapshot. Readers who were halfway through a story could at least finish the chapter as it stood at the last snapshot.

Archive of Our Own, the fanfiction archive its readers call AO3, went dark on Oct. 29. On X that evening, jay, posting as @kendallhosseini, put up a refresher: “in case anyone needs a refresher: you can paste a fics URL into the wayback machine and read it as if you are on AO3. only catch is that newer fics are less likely to be archived.” AO3 holds 18.8 million works across 83,000 fandoms, according to the New York Times, and more than 11 million registered users, according to Gizmodo.

Mark Graham, the director of the Wayback Machine, told the New York Times that the surge of readers turning to archived copies was putting a heavy load on the service, and called an outage of this length nearly unheard of. The Wayback Machine records snapshots of sites across the internet every day, and AO3’s pages were among them long before anyone needed a substitute. A snapshot is still a photograph of a page on one day. A story updated after that visit stays updated only on AO3. A story an author locked to registered readers does not appear in the public snapshots at all.

The AO3 outage began as maintenance. The OTW, the nonprofit that runs AO3, logged the site as down for maintenance at 07:13 UTC on Oct. 29 and said the work would take at least 12 hours. At 01:27 UTC on Oct. 30, the OTW said on its status page that the team had detected evidence of a security incident and was still determining its scope. The estimate given that night was two weeks at minimum, and possibly four. On Nov. 3, the Oct. 30 update was still the latest entry on the status page.

The OTW said no AO3 data had been deleted. “All your works, bookmarks, kudos, etc., are safe,” the OTW wrote in its update. The second half of the same update was less settled. The organization said it did not currently believe the user database had been stolen, and in the same sentence said it was unable to rule that out. That database can hold a username, an email address, an IP address and a hashed password, and the OTW advised anyone who reused their AO3 password elsewhere to change it there. Real names were never collected, the OTW said, and donor records sit in a separate system that was never linked to AO3.

The shared folders were the next copy readers reached for. NBC News reported that moderators of the r/AO3 community on Reddit set up megathreads for finding and sharing copies of favorite works, and that a public Google Drive link called the Fanfic Emergency Fund gathered works across fandoms and genres. Meghan, posting on Threads as @just.meghannn, shared one such folder with a claim she did not try to prove. “So I may have hit the mother load… I found a Google drive that’s not just heated rivalry, and when I tried scrolling to the bottom I couldn’t reach it. It’s literally the WHOLE OF AO3,” she wrote. She added that she did not know who had made the folder, or how. The link attached to her post was labelled Fanfic Emergency Fund, the same name as the public drive.

Paola Fuentes, posting as @polafran on Threads, told readers to check the Wayback Machine first, with the same warning about logged-in works. “Tips for surviving the “AO3pocalypse” #AO3 1- If you were in the middle of reading a fanfic and have the link, check if it’s available on the Wayback Machine. It doesn’t work for every fic—especially those that required you to be logged in to read them—but it’s better than nothing.” Her third tip ran the other way from the sharing. “3- DO NOT UPLOAD IT TO GOOGLE DRIVE!!! If you uploaded your fics to Google Drive, download them back and delete them from there. I know a lot of people use Google Drive as a backup, but please don’t use it in this situation because it will be scraped. Instead, use Proton Drive, which is encrypted and won’t be scraped.”

On Nov. 2, Kotaku reported that a site calling itself AO3.life appeared to have scraped a cached version of the archive, including older versions of works and works that had been deleted or made private. It was offering to sell the stories as audiobooks, splitting the proceeds “91% to the author, 9% to ao3.life.” To claim money, or to have a work removed, the site asked for an email sent from the account tied to the author’s AO3 profile. Users on social media called that request a phishing and doxxing attempt, Kotaku reported. The OTW said it was taking steps to have the site removed. A moderator on the r/AO3 subreddit shared an OTW message: “We are aware and are taking action, but please be patient because the legal system is much slower than online life.”

Lisa S., posting as @silvanshadow on Threads, put the warning in plainer terms. “AO3.life is the real danger to fanfic and authors. I’m sure AO3 knows about it and has their attorneys on it. It’s probably safer to report the site to their host than to send them an email.” The OTW added a note to its Oct. 30 update on Nov. 1, pointing readers to a Tumblr post of safety practices and warnings about scammers and suspicious sites.

AO3 itself was built by people who had already thought about copies. The OTW’s Open Doors project, running since 2012, imports at-risk fan archives into AO3, but only with the curator’s consent, and creators keep control of their own works. AO3 also gives every work a Download button, saving the whole work as it stood, in formats including EPUB, MOBI and PDF. The scraped site copied the works without asking: no author was asked, and works that had been deleted or locked could turn up again there. A shared folder holds what its uploader chose to include, with no record of where each file came from.

The scrape was not new, either. In April 2025, a user on Hugging Face published a dataset said to hold 12.6 million AO3 works. It had been built from work IDs 1 to 63.2 million that were publicly accessible. Takedown notices had the datasets deleted or disabled by Apr. 23, according to Fanlore’s record of the episode. The uploader then reposted them on ModelScope and a personal website. Authors who checked the dataset reported finding archive-locked works in it. AO3 had already blocked the Common Crawl crawler in December 2022, after its pages were included in a crawl used to train systems such as ChatGPT.

In July 2023 the archive went down for 28 hours under denial-of-service attacks that peaked at 1.5 million requests a second, with its data centre reporting as much as 1.2 terabits a second of traffic. A group calling itself Anonymous Sudan claimed the attack, without proof, and demanded a ransom, according to Cloudflare. Cloudflare took the OTW into its Project Galileo program and had the site back online within three hours of the application, later mitigating more than 7 billion abusive requests in about 10 hours.

Its founder, Rebecca Tushnet, told the New York Times there had been an intrusion, and that the volunteer crew was working to “figure out the path that the attacker used and make sure that it’s been removed.” Cloudflare’s case study, using figures from March 2024, put AO3 at almost 3 billion page views a month, served by more than 800 volunteers. The OTW’s 2024 budget put the archive’s costs at $317,388 for the year. Another $120,000 was budgeted for new servers, all of it paid for by donations.

An OTW spokesperson told NBC News the organization would share updates as soon as verified information became available. “We love seeing how fans mobilize and support one another, both through and beyond AO3,” the spokesperson said.