Posted in: Books, Pop Culture, Technology | Tagged: AO3, archive of our own
Archive of Our Own Is Back Online And It’s (Almost) Fully Functional
After two weeks and mere hours after its seventeenth anniversary, Archive of Our Own is back online with almost all of its features back online (for now).
Article Summary
- Archive of Our Own is back online after more than two weeks offline following a major security incident.
- AO3 says most features are working again, though icons, external imports, and non-HTML downloads remain disabled.
- Archive of Our Own says no data was deleted, draft deletion is paused, and users should consider changing passwords.
- AO3 returned shortly after its 17th anniversary, with more updates expected as full functionality is restored.
After just over two weeks of being completely offline due to a security incident, Archive of Our Own quietly returned to the internet at the witching hour tonight. It comes mere hours after the website celebrated its seventeenth birthday, too, which is pretty crazy to think about. The site is almost entirely functional, but a few things are offline. There’s a short banner at the top of the site that covers the bullet points, but the status site goes into the details and is long.
From the official AO3 status website: “AO3 is now up! Some features have been temporarily disabled to allow us to bring the site back earlier than the four-week mark. At this time, icons across the site (user icons, collection icons, etc.) are disabled, external work importing is unavailable, and works can only be downloaded in HTML format. These features will be restored. No icons have been deleted, they are simply not being displayed currently.
No AO3 data has been deleted. Your works, bookmarks, kudos, etc., are still safe. Draft deletion was successfully paused and no drafts have been deleted while AO3 was down. In addition, we are going to leave draft deletion paused for the next two weeks to allow users time to log back into their accounts and save copies of or publish their drafts. Beginning November 29, draft deletion will return to normal and all drafts which are 30 days old will be deleted. Please note that the deletion date listed at the top of the draft will remain listed as 30 days after the original creation date and will not reflect the new deadline. We recommend you review your drafts and either save a copy for yourself or post them as soon as you are able.
As this is a security incident, we will not be sharing specifics about what mitigating changes are being made at this time. However, we do want to share that we’ve partnered with a security firm to review the incident and analyze the site to help prevent future incidents. AO3’s security is deeply important to us.
At this time, we have no reason to believe that the user database was compromised, though we cannot rule out that possibility. As the site is now up, we recommend you consider changing your password and ensuring that your email is up-to-date. As a precaution, we also recommend changing your password on any other sites where you have reused your AO3 password.
We understand that the wait and uncertainty surrounding AO3’s return have been difficult, and we apologize for the inconvenience. We greatly appreciate your support during the downtime, and continued patience as our volunteers work hard to return AO3 to its full functionality. We will provide further updates when we have them.
Posted 10 minutes ago. Nov 15, 2026 – 08:28 UTC”
It was probably a pretty smart move to bring the servers back online when the United States is asleep since it means the AO3 servers can’t get completely destroyed. However, if I were a betting woman, I’d say there is a good chance things might be a bit wonky until we get to that four-week mark, but absolutely in the next 24-48 hours. Maybe some of the dumbest discourse to ever exist on the internet can finally come to an end.
The AO3 outage was covered by a bunch of mainstream news outlets, both in ways that were respectful to the fans who make all the work on the site and in ways that weren’t. It was always going to happen; AO3 is the 56th most-viewed website, according to some online estimates. When a website that big went down the way AO3 did, it was always going to jump to the tech side of the news, but the loud and passionate reactions on social media drew everyone else’s eyes. Ironically, the passionate fans whose reactions caught the eye of mainstream news outlets were the same ones who were unhappy that mainstream news outlets were covering the outage at all.
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