Critical incident

Organization for Transformative Works: AO3 Down for Maintenance

Affected: Archive of Our Own

Current status of Organization for Transformative Works: Partial outage — live Organization for Transformative Works status

Timeline

1. Oct 29, 2026, 07:13 UTC
   investigating
   AO3 is down for maintenance.
2. Oct 29, 2026, 09:03 UTC
   identified
   AO3 maintenance is in progress. We expect it to take at least 12 hours, but it may take longer. We will provide updates as necessary.
3. Oct 29, 2026, 17:41 UTC
   identified
   We estimate that service restoration for #AO3 will take around 2 weeks but it could be up to 4 weeks. We are hopeful that we will be able to bring the site back up in a degraded state sooner. If that does happen, there may be times when the site has to be brought down temporarily until this is fully resolved. Please stay tuned for further info.
4. Oct 30, 2026, 01:27 UTC
   identified
   Earlier today, we detected evidence of a security incident on AO3. We are still in the early stages of response to this security incident and determining its scope. AO3 will remain down while we continue investigating and addressing what has been found so far. However, we want to make some things clear: First, no AO3 data has been deleted. All your works, bookmarks, kudos, etc., are safe. Second, while we currently don't believe that the user database was stolen, we are also unable to rule it out. The AO3 database contains account information that may include your username, email address, IP address, and a hashed version of your password. We use industry-standard techniques for storing passwords in a scrambled form that cannot easily be reversed. Even so, no hashing method can fully protect a weak or reused password from being cracked. As a precaution, we recommend that you change your passwords on any other sites where you use the same password as on AO3. AO3 does not collect real names, so none could be exposed. Additionally, our donor information is held in an entirely separate system and is never linked to AO3, so that data has also not been exposed. We will update everyone as our investigation continues; we may be unable to respond to individual inquiries from users. Please keep an eye on our official outlets for updates. Our next update will be posted when we have further information available. Our current expectation is that AO3 will be down for a minimum of two weeks; however, it could take up to four weeks. During that time, we may be able to bring the site back up in a degraded state, meaning that not all features will be available and/or the site may be read-only. If we are able to do that, please be aware that we might have to bring the site back down unexpectedly as part of our recovery efforts. We will keep you in the loop for any developments.
5. Nov 6, 2026, 00:00 UTC
   identified
   While #AO3 remains down, we wanted to share that work to restore AO3 and make changes to prevent future incidents is ongoing and proceeding well. We believe that our original return time estimate remains accurate. As part of our work to restore AO3, some notification emails (such as subscription updates and kudos announcements) that were queued before AO3 went down in October were released. These emails are real, from us, and are not a reason for concern. We know that many people are concerned about drafts they had in progress saved on AO3. We are actively working to ensure that drafts are not deleted during this period. We will provide further updates when we have them.

Updates as published by Organization for Transformative Works (original).