Our Own Archive (AO3) will be offline for over half a day on Wednesday as it runs some updates. Users of the famous fan fiction forum are going crazy about it as expected.
Fans of fan fiction have been warned about this week’s AO3 ending early, with its official account of X’s situation to be discussed on Monday. A yellow banner at the top of the AO3 website also alerted users to the planned outage, ensuring that those who weren’t on X also received plenty of notice.
The planned downtime is to allow AO3 to make improvements to its bookmarking and thread search functions, including adding the ability to sort and sort functions by word count. Other updates include fixing bookmark search results when job tags contain letters and numbers, and making sure thread blurbs can only use tags used in draft jobs.
However, this means that the cornucopia of Hugo Award-winning fan-fiction will be counted down by the time such a development occurs. AO3 says the outage will last about 15 hours, leaving fan fiction readers without a clue for much of Wednesday.
Mashable Trend Report
The good news is that AO3 will return within a day, and in theory it will be better than ever when it returns. The bad news is, unless you’ve already downloaded your favorite fics or are willing to wade through other forums, you’ll have to put up with our harsh reality without your comfort pain/comfort WIP for a while.
When will AO3 be backed up?
The AO3 outage is scheduled to begin at 3:00 am ET / 12:00 am PT on Wednesday, and is expected to last approximately 15 hours. As such, AO3 will be back up around 6:00 pm ET / 3:00 pm PT at the earliest.
Of course, it’s possible that AO3 will wake up early if the reviews go better than expected. It may also be down for a while if the AO3 group experiences problems. Your best bet is to keep checking when it’s expected to return, and follow AO3’s official Tumblr, Bluesky, X, or status page for updates.
This Tweet is currently unavailable. Either it is loading or it has already been downloaded.
While this week’s downtime is notable for its length, AO3 veterans have endured various outages over the years — including the 2023 DDoS attack that took the beloved archive offline for nearly two days. It has become a unifying tradition for the AO3 community to take to social media during this time off, turning their wits to mourn the event with humor and comfort each other during both trying times. Fortunately, such devastating times have not happened so far, and are not expected to do so anytime soon.
This Tweet is currently unavailable. Either it is loading or it has already been downloaded.
This Tweet is currently unavailable. Either it is loading or it has already been downloaded.
This Tweet is currently unavailable. Either it is loading or it has already been downloaded.
This Tweet is currently unavailable. Either it is loading or it has already been downloaded.
This Tweet is currently unavailable. Either it is loading or it has already been downloaded.
This Tweet is currently unavailable. Either it is loading or it has already been downloaded.
