Key facts
- AO3 could be offline for up to four weeks.
- Service restoration is estimated to take two weeks but could last up to a month.
- The site is built on the Ruby on Rails framework, not PHP.
The popular fan fiction website Archive of Our Own (AO3) has announced that it may remain offline for up to four weeks. The site went offline for routine overnight maintenance, but the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), which operates AO3, stated that service restoration is estimated to take two weeks, with a possibility of extending to a full month. The OTW relies on volunteers and donations to maintain the site. Within two hours of the announcement, AO3's status page had garnered millions of views and significant commentary on social media. The outage is not believed to be related to recent critical flaws discovered in the PHP programming language, as AO3 is built on the Ruby on Rails framework.