In Brief

Posted:

1:43 PM PDT · October 29, 2026

Image Credits: Benjamin White (opens in a new window) / Flickr (opens in a new window) under a CC BY-SA 2.0 (opens in a new window) license.

Archive of our Own (AO3), the popular site where fans publish and read stories about their favorite characters and worlds, has bad news for its community. After going offline for what was supposed to be routine overnight maintenance, the site says it could stay online for almost a whole month.

AO3 did not initially share details about what caused the outage, but published a longer statement hours after announcing that the site would likely be down for two to four weeks.

“Earlier today, we detected evidence of a security incident on AO3,” the statement reads . “We are still in the early stages of response to this security incident and determining its scope.…