AO3 Suffers Major Outage: Possibly No Fanfic for 2 Weeks or Longer – CNET

October has been a rocky month for readers of the fan-run fiction site Archive of Our Own, popularly known as AO3. Now, a routine disruption has escalated into a crisis. What began as an estimated 12-hour unplanned outage has ballooned into a multi-week shutdown, leaving millions of users locked out of the site following a series of intermittent disruptions throughout the month. An outage of this magnitude hit readers out of nowhere, landing with all the subtlety of a Looney Tunes anvil. The platform is operated by the Organization for Transformative Works. An update posted Thursday to the site’s status page and shared via Bluesky and Tumblr said that service restoration will take at least two weeks, possibly four. “We are hopeful that we will be able to bring the site back up in a degraded state sooner,” the update said. “If that does happen, there may be times when the site has to be brought down temporarily until this is fully resolved.” That update followed an initial notification, 12 hours earlier, with the announcement that “AO3 maintenance is in progress. We expect it to take at least 12 hours, but it may take longer.” In response to a CNET
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