Cyberattack halts fanfiction platform AO3 — Taipei Times

The fanfiction platform Archive of Our Own, known as AO3, has been offline for more than a week due to a cyberattack. Since Oct. 29, visitors to the site have seen a maintenance notice, while millions of fans have lost access to stories, Taipei Times reports.

One of the largest fanfiction platforms

Fanfiction consists of works by amateur authors who use characters and worlds from existing books, films or television series. Authors can rewrite endings, create romantic storylines or invent adventures for secondary characters, and then publish their texts online for free.

AO3 was launched in 2008. The platform hosts nearly 18 million works, while the number of registered users exceeds 11 million. In 2019, the site received a Hugo Award in the Best Related Work category.

Fanfiction has also become a source of new authors for the publishing industry. In particular, E. L. James' novel Fifty Shades of Grey began as Twilight fanfiction, while Ali Hazelwood's bestseller The Love Hypothesis emerged from the Star Wars universe.

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Risk of user database theft

The platform is operated by the nonprofit Organization for Transformative Works. Its co-founder, Harvard Law School professor Rebecca Tushnet, said that AO3 has not disappeared and that no data has been lost. At the same time, the organization does not believe that the user database was stolen, but cannot rule this out definitively.

The database contains usernames, email addresses and encrypted passwords. The Organization for Transformative Works hopes to restore the site within a month.

Web developer Yoann Mebrouk noted that such a timeframe may indicate the seriousness of the attack, the team's limited resources or the need for a full software overhaul. According to him, if database backups were created properly, users will be able to recover all of their content.