Photo Courtesy of Archive of Our Own- Wikimedia Commons
The popular fan fiction site, Archive of Our Own, is dealing with one of its longest ever shutdowns. While users wait for it to be repaired, there are a few things to do in the meantime.
One of the internet’s most beloved websites for fanfiction, creative writing, and other fannish media, Archive of Our Own (AO3), is still down following its initial shutdown on Oct. 29. The outage was expected to last no more than a day—which is semi-common for the website—but an update was released on the status website for the Organization of Transformative Works the same day, which explained that the “service restoration for #AO3 will take around 2 weeks but it could be up to 4 weeks.”
The prolonged outage was announced following the Organization for Transformative Works detecting “evidence of a security incident on AO3”; the organization decided to keep AO3 down “while [they] continue investigating and addressing what has been found so far” to prevent the security incident from developing into any further problems.
Once people became aware that the outage was due to a security incident, they began to worry what personal data could be scalped from the site, alongside a worry about losing data such as bookmarks, drafts, works, and kudos. On AO3’s official Tumblr thread, the team assured users that “no AO3 data has been deleted,” and that “AO3 does not collect real names, so none could be exposed. Additionally, [their] donor information is held in an entirely separate system and is never linked to AO3, so that data has also not been exposed.” This reassured many who have a large amount of stored data within the site.
However, AO3’s team stated that, despite the website’s well encrypted password storage system, no storage system is 100 percent secure, and they suggest that users “change [their] passwords on any other sites where [they] use the same password as on AO3” as an extra precaution.
Many avid readers and writers have found themselves at a loss when it comes to replacing AO3 during the site’s month-long outage, but some have found alternatives. One of AO3’s largest competitors in the online fanfiction scene—Wattpad—made a post on their Instagram page stating that, despite the fact that “nobody can replace AO3,” Wattpad is “here for you,” and the site turned off all ads on the website for the first weekend following the AO3 outage.
NBC News stated that some writers who have ongoing works on AO3 “are uploading new chapters of their fanfiction stories to their Tumblr blogs,” while some others have started publicly accessible “shared Google folders” where readers can find their ongoing works. A moderator on AO3’s reddit page started a “megathread” which users can utilize to share and gain any updated information regarding the outage or suggestions for temporary alternatives; the initial reddit post on the thread suggested utilizing both the Wayback Machine to access any works which a reader has the direct link to, and reading fanfictions on SquidgeWorld, which is a similar website to AO3.
Shortly following the outage of AO3, a copycat website at the URL AO3.life was created by a single user through employing the use of “a swarm of AI Agents controlling 40 virtual machines [that] were scraping the internet for all drives, scrapes, and sources,” which scalped AO3 of its works to make them accessible again. However, the site’s data was taken down by its creator following controversies about its use of AI. The site took free content from the internet—without the permission of the authors—and charged users “for AI Slop audiobooks” of the scalped works, which is detailed on the frontpage of the soon-to-be shutdown website; the site received “over 2,000 takedown requests” and the creator of the site claims, “it was never my intention to hurt so many authors—and I’m truly sorry to you all. There’s no way to show my sorry better than taking this site down.” The site is currently only home to an apology and explanation by its creator.
AO3 may be down, but its users are resilient, finding alternatives and workarounds—albeit sometimes not through the best means—to temporarily replace AO3. The non-profit site is continuing to work towards getting the website back up and functioning as soon as they can. Make sure to keep an eye on the site’s status page for further updates regarding the outage as the group promises to “provide further updates when [they] have them.”