One of the world’s leading fan fiction websites, a repository of homespun stories based on works like “Harry Potter,” “Twilight” and “Heated Rivalry,” announced this week that it would be offline for maintenance for as long as a month.
Its members were stunned. The site, AO3, short for “Archive of Our Own,” houses 18.8 million works across 83,000 fandoms inspired by books, films and even celebrities, such as the members of K-pop bands. It is run entirely by volunteers, and operated by a nonprofit, the Organization for Transformative Works.
Rebecca Tushnet, a founder of the organization, said in an interview Friday that there had been “an intrusion” on AO3 and that an all-volunteer crew was working to “figure out the path that the attacker used and make sure that it’s been removed.”
That was a day after AO3 said on its Tumblr page that it had “detected evidence of a security incident.” It said it was still “determining its scope” but assured its 12 million users that no data had been lost. “All your works, bookmarks, kudos, etc., are safe,” it said.
An outage of that duration is “nearly unheard-of,” Mark Graham, the director of the Wayback Machine, a digital repository operated through the Internet Archive, said in an email. He noted that a surge in traffic to archived versions of the site was now “putting a heavy load on the Wayback Machine,” which records snapshots of hundreds of sites daily across the internet.
Mehdi Daoudi, an expert on internet resilience at infrastructure monitoring company LogicMonitor, said that there can be many reasons for a service disruption, but they typically last for only a few minutes to a few hours.
“When I see something like this,” he said, “I can only speculate that there is something major being rebuilt.”
Tushnet, a legal scholar at Harvard Law School, said “there was no reason to believe” that AO3’s database had been downloaded. The team is prioritizing safety over speed, she said, and will need two to four weeks’ maintenance to ensure “that we haven’t missed anything.”
“We’re aware that fan fiction plays a big role in fans’ lives,” she added, “and we are taking that seriously.”
In July 2023, AO3 was the target of a distributed denial-of-service attack, in which hackers flood the servers hosting a website until it becomes overloaded and shuts down. AO3 was offline for 28 hours. A hacker group called Anonymous Sudan claimed responsibility and said it had targeted the site for hosting explicit content and stories with LGBTQ+ themes. AO3 said at the time that it urged “caution in believing any reasoning” proposed for such an attack.
Anne Jamison, an English professor at the University of Utah who teaches a course on fan fiction and who wrote the book “Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World,” said that part of the appeal of AO3 is the freedom it affords its members, unlike FanFiction.Net, an older site created in 1998 that is known for purging content.
Since its creation in 2009, AO3 has become “central to just a vast and multifaceted storytelling phenomenon,” she said.
“A lot of queer content, a lot of queer romance is on AO3,” Jamison said, adding that it can be the only content with gay themes available in countries where same-sex relationships are criminalized.
“So it can have a pretty important cultural function,” she added.
Jameson was up at 2 a.m. Thursday looking for a reprieve from a grueling workweek when she visited the site and saw it was down.
“It’s like your library disappeared,” she said.
Many in the fan fiction community feel the same. Online, fan fiction devotees bemoaned the loss and swapped PDF downloads of stories. Users of Reddit have attempted to diagnose the outage in long threads on the website.
“I mean, people are so sad,” Jameson said, noting that the site receives hundreds of millions of views a week. “Like, I can’t even.”
She relayed a message from one of her students: “I have 18 tabs open on my browser from AO3, and I can’t believe I now have to be productive.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.