ao3.life

Is AO3 down? What happened in October 2026

Yes. The Archive of Our Own went offline on 29 October 2026 and, as of 1 November, is still down. It is an outage after a security incident, not a closure. Here is what the people who run it have said, with sources.

Updated

Short answer (checked 1 November 2026): AO3 is down. Its operator, the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), found evidence of a security incident and expects the site to stay down for at least two weeks, possibly up to four.1 The OTW says no works, bookmarks or kudos were deleted.1 For the live status, check otwstatus.org.

Timeline

All times UTC, from the OTW's status page.1

  • 29 October, 07:13 · “AO3 is down for maintenance.”
  • 29 October, 09:03 · Maintenance in progress, expected to take at least 12 hours, possibly longer.
  • 29 October, 17:41 · Restoration estimated at around two weeks, possibly up to four. The OTW hopes to bring the site back sooner in a degraded state, and warned it may have to take it down again while the problem is fixed.
  • 30 October, 01:27 · The OTW reports evidence of a security incident on AO3. The site stays down while it investigates. Expectation: down for a minimum of two weeks, up to four. It may come back read-only or with features missing, and may go down again unexpectedly.

TechCrunch reported the outage and the two-to-four-week estimate on 29 October.4

Was my data stolen?

The OTW does not know yet. In its 30 October update it said:1

  • No AO3 data has been deleted; works, bookmarks and kudos are safe.
  • It does not currently believe the user database was stolen, but cannot rule it out. That database can include usernames, email addresses, IP addresses and hashed passwords.
  • AO3 does not collect real names. Donor information is kept in a separate system that was not exposed.
  • It recommends changing your password on any other site where you used the same password as on AO3.

That last step is worth doing today. Also be wary of any site or message asking for your AO3 login while the Archive is down. ao3.life never asks for it: sign-in here is an emailed link only.

Is AO3 shutting down for good?

No. Nothing the OTW has published suggests a permanent shutdown. It talks about restoring service, possibly in stages, and says the data is intact.1 “AO3 shutdown” is how a lot of people are searching for this, but what is happening is a long outage.

Is it the PHP vulnerability?

Probably not the way some posts suggest. On 21 October the OTW took Fanlore, its wiki, offline for a few hours because of unpatched PHP vulnerabilities, and brought it back the same day.3 AO3 itself is a separate application written in Ruby on Rails.6 The OTW has not said what caused the AO3 incident.

Has AO3 gone down before?

  • 23 to 24 October 2026: emails, search, history and listings were delayed by a background-processing problem; resolved within hours, with no data lost.2
  • 10 July 2023: a denial-of-service attack, claimed by a group calling itself Anonymous Sudan, took AO3 offline; it was back the next day behind Cloudflare.5

AO3 is a nonprofit funded by donations, and a very large one: over 18.4 million works in more than 82,900 fandoms as of September 2026.5

How to check if AO3 is back

  • otwstatus.org, the OTW's own status page, updated first.
  • AO3 News, the official announcements account.
  • Skip generic “is it down” checkers: they guess from user reports and many are ad pages.

Keep reading while it's down

ao3.life is an independent archive of AO3 works, holding 15,831,236 of them right now. You can search by title, author, fandom, ship or trope, read in your browser, download a work as EPUB to keep on your phone or e-reader, or listen to it. Start with the biggest fandoms or a favourite trope.

What ao3.life is not: it is not AO3 and not run by the OTW. You can't post, leave kudos or comment here, and the copies are works as they were when saved, so very recent chapters may be missing. When AO3 is back, go back and leave the author a comment. Every work belongs to its author, and authors can have theirs removed at any time.

Sources

  1. OTW Status, “AO3 Down for Maintenance” incident updates, 29–30 October 2026. otwstatus.org/incidents/g12jnxck9g6h
  2. OTW Status, “AO3 Emails, History, and Search Updates Delayed”, 23–24 October 2026. otwstatus.org/incidents/0k9wfcp9frzf
  3. OTW Status, “Fanlore Downtime”, 21 October 2026. otwstatus.org/incidents/4tg4y360k08g
  4. TechCrunch, “Fan-fiction site Archive of Our Own (AO3) could be offline for up to 4 weeks after security incident”, 29 October 2026. techcrunch.com
  5. Wikipedia, “Archive of Our Own” (size as of 18 September 2026; July 2023 attack). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive_of_Our_Own
  6. otwarchive, the AO3 source code (Ruby on Rails). github.com/otwcode/otwarchive