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Archive of Our Own outage may last up to four weeks, OTW says
The Organization for Transformative Works said Archive of Our Own could stay offline for two to four weeks after a security incident, 404 Media reported.
Archive of Our Own, the large fanfiction archive run by the nonprofit Organization for Transformative Works, remains offline, and OTW has said restoring the site could take two to four weeks1,2.
404 Media reported Sunday that the site went down for maintenance Thursday and that OTW later lengthened its estimate from hours to as long as a month1. OTW’s status page said it hoped to bring AO3 back in a degraded or read-only form sooner, with possible further outages during recovery2.
On the status page, OTW later said it had detected evidence of a security incident and was still determining the scope2. It said no AO3 data had been deleted and that works, bookmarks and kudos were safe2.
OTW said it did not currently believe the user database was stolen but could not rule it out2. It said the database may include usernames, email addresses, IP addresses and hashed passwords, and it advised users who reused passwords elsewhere to change them2.
OTW said AO3 does not collect real names and that donor records sit in a separate system not linked to the archive2. It also said some queued notification emails from before the October outage had been released and were legitimate2.
OTW said it was working to keep in-progress drafts from being deleted2. 404 Media said that as of September the archive hosted more than 18.4 million works across more than 82,900 fandoms1.
OTW said further updates would follow when more information was available2.
Sources
How it’s being reported
2 sourcesFirst reported by 
otwstatus.org
Massive Fanfic Site Archive of Our Own Says It’s Going Down for 'Up to 4 Weeks'
The length of the outage and its timing for fan culture around holiday reading and new book releases.
404 Media reported that AO3 could remain down for as long as a month after going offline for maintenance.
Leaves out Fan-community calendar context (holiday reading, book-release week) is not on the status page.
otwstatus.orgFirstArchive Of Our Own down for maintenance for 2 to 4 weeks
Security-incident response, password-hash exposure risk, and draft preservation.
OTW status page: AO3 remains down while staff restore the site and respond to a security incident; user data is said not to have been deleted.
Where they agree
- AO3 is offline and OTW has estimated restoration at about two weeks, possibly up to four.
- OTW has said it may restore a degraded or partial site before a full recovery.