AO3 goes offline for up to four weeks after security breach
The Organization for Transformative Works says the outage is unrelated to the PHP flaws that recently hit other sites.
Fan fiction website Archive of Our Own went offline last week and will stay down for up to four weeks, Publishers Marketplace reported. The Organization for Transformative Works, which runs AO3, said the outage followed a security breach.
The organization said the breach was unrelated to the PHP programming language flaws that recently shut down many other sites. AO3 will be down for a minimum of two weeks, and possibly up to four, according to the outlet.
Publishers Marketplace noted the outage lands amid a run of other challenges facing publishing, including book bans, weak nonfiction sales, growing AI slop, and a bumpy rollout of the Anthropic settlement disbursement.
One security breach, one site, and a chunk of the fanfic world goes dark for up to a month. I don't have numbers on who posts there or how many stories are sitting behind that outage, so I won't guess. What I can tell you is this is one more entry on an already long list this week of things not working in publishing right now.
From the Coral Wire edition of Fri, Nov 6 2026 · Coral Index 28/100 (Storm warning)