Archive of Our Own is back online after more than two weeks offline following a security incident, the fanfiction archive’s operator, the Organization for Transformative Works, announced on Sunday.
The site, known to its millions of users as AO3, went offline on October 29 after the nonprofit found evidence of a security incident. It reopened at 08:28 UTC on Sunday, shortly after the archive’s seventeenth anniversary, and within the two-to-four-week recovery window the organisation had warned users to expect.
The return came earlier than the upper end of that estimate because some features were switched off to bring the site back sooner. User and collection icons are hidden across the site, although the organisation confirmed none have been deleted. External work importing is temporarily unavailable, and works can only be downloaded in HTML format for the time being. The site’s status remains listed as degraded performance while the incident is being addressed, and heavy traffic may cause delays when loading pages.
No archived content was deleted during the outage, the organisation said. Works, bookmarks, kudos and other user activity are intact, and draft deletion was successfully paused while the site was down. That pause will remain in place for another two weeks so users have time to log back in and save or publish their drafts; normal draft deletion is scheduled to resume on November 29, when drafts that are 30 days old may be removed.
The organisation has partnered with an external security firm to review what happened and analyse its systems, but it has not shared specifics about the incident or the changes being made. It said it has no reason to believe the AO3 user database was compromised, though it still cannot rule out that possibility. The database may contain usernames, email addresses, IP addresses and hashed passwords.
Users are being advised to consider changing their AO3 password, to make sure the email address on their account is up to date, and to change passwords on any other websites where they reused the same credentials. AO3 hosts more than 18 million fan-created works, and its return drew more than 500,000 Google searches in the United States on Sunday.
