Technology1 min read

Fan fiction site Archive of Our Own could be offline for up to 4 weeks

By · Via TechCrunch · Published by Everything Blog

In short

The platform's status page revealed that what began as routine maintenance will now require roughly two weeks to a month to completely resolve. Maintained by the donation-funded nonprofit Organization for Transformative Works, the site quickly garnered millions of views and alarmed comments online following the news. Despite recent industry-wide cybersecurity concerns regarding critical PHP vulnerabilities, the site avoids that threat because it operates on the Ruby on Rails framework. Neither the parent nonprofit nor the website's administrators immediately responded to requests for comment.

Key points

  • The volunteer-run platform faces an extended service disruption that could last up to a m…: The volunteer-run platform faces an extended service disruption that could last up to a month, though a degraded launch may happen sooner.
  • News of the prolonged technical downtime drew millions of views and prompted immediate pa…: News of the prolonged technical downtime drew millions of views and prompted immediate panicked reactions across social media networks.
  • The extended outage appears completely unrelated to the severe security flaws recently id…: The extended outage appears completely unrelated to the severe security flaws recently identified as PHP Armageddon.

Sources checked by our analysis pipeline: 1

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.

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

AO3 is a project of the nonprofit Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), which relies on volunteers and donations to keep the site afloat. The site has such a passionate user base that, within two hours of the announcement, its status page’s posts had garnered millions of views (and much panicked commentary) across social media.

Some fans may suspect this issue is related to last week’s “PHP Armageddon,” when tools from OpenAI and Google Wiz uncovered two critical flaws in PHP, the programming language that runs the…

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