Archive of Our Own (AO3) will be offline for over half a day on Wednesday as it implements some updates. Users of the popular fan fiction platform are being about as chill about it as expected.
Fan fiction fans were warned of this week’s AO3 outage well in advance, with its official X status account offering a heads up on Monday. A yellow banner at the top of the AO3 website also alerted users to the planned outage, ensuring those who weren’t on X also received plenty of notice.
The scheduled downtime is to allow AO3 to implement improvements to its bookmarks and series search functions, including adding the ability to filter and sort works by word count. Other updates include fixing bookmark search results when a work’s tags contain letters and numbers, and ensuring series’ blurbs can’t use tags that were only used on draft works.
However, this means that the Hugo Award-winning fan fiction cornucopia will be down for the count while such upgrades are taking place. AO3 states that the outage will last for about 15 hours, leaving fan fiction readers bereft of material for much of Wednesday.
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The good news is that AO3 will return within the day, and theoretically will be better than ever when it does. The bad news is that, unless you already downloaded your favourite fics or are willing to scrounge around alternative platforms, you’ll just have to endure our harsh reality without your comfort hurt/comfort WIP for a while.
When will AO3 be back up?
The AO3 outage is scheduled to begin at 3:00 a.m. ET / 12:00 a.m. PT on Wednesday, and is expected to last for approximately 15 hours. As such, AO3 will be back up at around 6:00 p.m. ET / 3:00 p.m. PT at the earliest.
Of course, it’s possible that AO3 will be up earlier if updates go more smoothly than anticipated. It might also be down for a little longer if AO3’s team encounters complications. Your best bet is to keep checking in around the time it’s expected to return, and follow AO3’s official Tumblr, Bluesky, X, or status page for updates.
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Though this week’s downtime is notable due to its length, AO3 veterans have staunchly endured various outages over the years — including a 2023 DDoS attack which took the beloved archive offline for almost two days. It has become a unifying tradition for AO3’s community to take to social media during such downtime, flexing their creativity to humorously lament the event and commiserate with each other in these trying times. Fortunately, such desolate times haven’t lasted thus far, and aren’t expected to do so any time soon.
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