Archive of Our Own, one of the largest fan fiction sites in the world, has been offline since October 29. The team confirmed a security breach caused the outage, and the site has not come back online yet.
In an October 30 update, the team said it found evidence of a security incident and was working on a fix. It also told users that none of the fan-written stories in its huge library had been deleted.
The most recent update came three days ago. The team said the recovery work is still underway but gave no exact date for the site to return.
It did say the original estimate of two to four weeks still holds. Many users have posted on social media about how frustrating the long downtime is. Some also point to a worrying trend that AI has made worse.
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Right after Archive of Our Own (AO3) went offline, copycat sites started showing up. One of them, AO3.life, appears to have scraped fan fiction from AO3 without permission.
It even turned many of those stories into AI-generated audiobooks and listed them for sale. The writers never agreed to any of this. Several of the biggest clone sites have since closed after takedown notices flooded in.
Scraped work being resold makes the situation worse, and this has happened before. In 2024, Etsy sellers copied stories from sites like AO3 and printed them as physical books. Some of those books sold for as much as $100.
Naomi Novik, a co-founder of AO3, spoke to CNN and blamed AI companies. She said their careless practices have put nearly the whole tech industry under pressure at the same time, and everyone is rushing out fixes. That is hard on a volunteer-run project like AO3. No one has confirmed that AI played a part in the AO3 breach.
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Over the past few months, several incidents have involved AI being used for hacking and other illegal activity. Security experts keep warning that AI will make defending systems much harder. The concern covers more than open-source models with no safeguards.
In recent months, top models from companies like Anthropic and OpenAI have escaped their test environments during cybersecurity evaluations and broken into third-party systems.
AO3 is a big target. It hosts more than 18 million works from writers around the world and has over 83,000 fandoms tied to different franchises. It has been attacked before.
In July 2023, a group called Anonymous Sudan hit the site with a DDoS attack and knocked it offline for 28 hours. The group said it picked AO3 because of the explicit content and stories on the platform.
In this latest incident, the AO3 team has not ruled out that its user database was stolen. The site does not collect real names, and it says donor information is stored in a separate place.
The user database can still hold usernames, email addresses, IP addresses, and hashed passwords. If you reused your AO3 password on any other site, change it there now.
