AO3 recovery after shutdown may take up to four weeks — Engadget

The fanfiction platform Archive of Our Own (AO3) has been taken offline for maintenance, and restoring its operation may take about two weeks or up to four weeks. Engadget reports, citing the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), which founded the platform.

Recovery timeline extended

Initially, OTW planned to keep the site unavailable for 12 hours after it was taken offline. The organization later said it hoped to restore AO3 in a limited mode sooner, but in that case the site may be temporarily taken offline again until the work is completed.

AO3 contains millions of fan works based on books, films, television series and other works. According to a former AO3 volunteer who moderates the r/AO3 community, OTW said that the platform's data remained intact.

More current news is available on the UA.News Telegram channel Telegram.

The cause of the outage was not disclosed

OTW did not specify the reason for the prolonged maintenance. Between October 23 and 24, the organization recorded problems with email notifications, search, history and works lists.

Over the past two weeks, some websites temporarily stopped operating due to two major security vulnerabilities — in the PHP programming language and TLS certificates. Another OTW resource, Fanlore, was briefly taken offline due to a PHP issue. At the same time, the organization did not state that these vulnerabilities were related to AO3 disruptions. OTW engineers work on a volunteer basis.