Fan fiction site Archive of Our Own may be offline up to 4 weeks

Archive of Our Own (AO3), a well-known site for fan fiction readers and writers, has announced it could remain offline for as long as four weeks following routine overnight maintenance, according to TechCrunch.

The AO3 status page estimates service restoration will take around two weeks but cautions it could extend to four weeks. The site hopes to restore service in a degraded state sooner.

AO3 is operated by the nonprofit Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), which depends on volunteers and donations to maintain the platform. The outage announcement quickly attracted millions of views and widespread concern on social media.

Some fans speculated the outage might be linked to recent critical flaws discovered in PHP, a programming language used by much of the internet. However, AO3 runs on Ruby on Rails, making a connection unlikely, TechCrunch reported.

OTW and AO3 have not provided further comments at this time. Updates will be shared on the AO3 status page as more information becomes available.