Don’t Panic—AO3 isn’t shutting down (2024)

FAQs

Is AO3 being shut down? ›

Due to recent confusion, the OTW would like to clarify that AO3 is NOT in any immediate danger.

As they say, sometimes truth is stranger than fan fiction. AO3, which stands for Archive of Our Own, is a popular website that hosts fan fiction stories written and published by users. The site crashed on July 10 due to a cyberattack and was down for just over a day.

Archive of Our Own (AO3), a popular fanfiction website, was shut down by the pro-Russian Anonymous Sudan group. The attackers are demanding a ransom payment to end the attack. Anonymous Sudan, the pro-Russian hacktivist group posing as a pro-Islam hacker collective, has taken down the website of AO3.

It combines the characters A, O, and 3 with arms raised in celebration, symbolizing the joy of fannish creation on the Archive. The acronym "AO3" comes from the initials of the English site title Archive of Our Own–an A and three O's.

“Unfortunately, the Archive of Our Own is currently inaccessible in China,” the Organization for Transformative Works, a US non-profit group that operates AO3, said on its Twitter account. “We've investigated, and it is not due to anything on our end.”

Content. The legal team working on behalf of Organization for Transformative Works believes that the publication of fan fiction on AO3 is legal under the Fair Use doctrine, meaning that they need to be "transformative", which they interpret as giving new meaning to the original work.

The longest ao3 fic is a 6.87 million word terminator fic.

Additionally, Xiao's fans have been demonstrating a tendency of 'heresy-style star worship' and toxic fandom: they would report to authorities if a work concerning their idol was deemed to besmirch their idol's image. Due to these reasons, Xiazhui, along with AO3 that hosts it, have been censored in China. BBC News.

According to a report from CybersecurityConnect, an anonymous group claimed credit for the attack, saying in a hom*ophobic Telegram post that A03 was targeted because of its “disgusting smuts.” The group, which previously claimed responsibility for cyberattacks against Microsoft and other organizations throughout Europe ...

Popular fanfiction site, Archive of Our Own (AO3), has been the victim of a targeted distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. DDoS attacks work by flooding a sites servers with traffic, meaning the site is unable to function properly and is taken offline.

Is AO3 safe to use now? ›

We are confident that we are compliant with the laws, including U.S. and EU laws regarding privacy, data protection, and data retention, that apply to the AO3. (It is relevant to the legal analysis that the AO3 does not host images other than 100×100 pixel user icons, which cannot be “orphaned” within our system).

The tl;dr is that the OTW and AO3 are not currently implicated by KOSA and many of the other bills because of our nonprofit status (most of the proposed laws only apply to for-profit institutions). This means the operations of the OTW and the AO3 wouldn't be directly impacted by these bills.

AO3 requires that creators either warn for—or explicitly choose not to warn for—a short list of common warnings: Major Character Death, Underage, Rape/Non-Con, and Graphic Depictions of Violence. We've also provided options to warn for additional content or to not warn for content at all.

The rumors, which surfaced from within the Chinese internet, involved the large adjacent fandom for The Untamed's main actor, Xiao Zhan, and focused on unsubstantiated reports of a harassment campaign launched by fans of Xiao Zhan against AO3 fanfic writers who wrote about him.

It is possible that AO3 is currently undergoing scheduled maintenance or undergoing updates, temporarily rendering it unavailable.

User reports indicate no current problems at Archive of Our Own.

According to a report from CybersecurityConnect, an anonymous group claimed credit for the attack, saying in a hom*ophobic Telegram post that A03 was targeted because of its “disgusting smuts.” The group, which previously claimed responsibility for cyberattacks against Microsoft and other organizations throughout Europe ...