Fan fiction hub Archive of Our Own may stay offline for up to four weeks

Archive of Our Own (AO3), the popular site where fans publish and read stories about their favorite characters and fictional worlds, has bad news for its community. The site went offline for what was supposed to be routine overnight maintenance, and it now says it may stay down for almost a whole month.

"We estimate that service restoration for AO3 will take around 2 weeks but it could be up to 4 weeks," the service's status page says. "We are hopeful that we will be able to bring the site back up in a degraded state sooner."

A worried community

AO3 is a project of the nonprofit Organization for Transformative Works (OTW). The site runs on volunteers and donations. Its audience is so devoted that within two hours of the announcement, posts from the status page had racked up millions of views on social media, along with plenty of anxious commentary.

Not a PHP problem

Some fans may have linked the outage to last week's "PHP Armageddon." Back then, tools from OpenAI and Google Wiz uncovered two critical vulnerabilities in PHP, the language that powers the back end of roughly 70% of the internet. AO3, however, isn't part of that majority: it is built on a different framework, Ruby on Rails, so a connection between the outage and those flaws is unlikely.

OTW and AO3 did not immediately respond to TechCrunch's requests for comment. The cause of the extended outage has not yet been disclosed.

Source: TechCrunch