Archive of Our Own restarts in limited return after shutdown; org says works, bookmarks and kudos are safe

The Story

Archive of Our Own (AO3) is now operating again in a limited return after a shutdown tied to a security incident, according to a status update posted by the Organization for Transformative Works.

The group said AO3 was “now up!” on Sunday, after the platform displayed “Bad Gateway” errors for about two weeks following its shutdown on Oct. 29. The update described a partial revival “in a degraded state,” and noted that the outage and uncertainty have been difficult for readers and authors.

The Organization for Transformative Works said contributors’ “works, bookmarks, kudos, etc., are still safe” and that no drafts were deleted during the outage. It also said it could not rule out that the user database might have been compromised.

Along with the limited restart, some features remained unavailable. The organization said user icons were disabled, importing of external work wasn’t available, and downloads were only possible in the web-language HTML format. It said those features are expected to return “ultimately.”

In its status update, the organization said it had predicted the security incident would take up to four weeks for AO3 to get back up, describing what was happening as an early stage of that recovery. It added, “We understand that the wait and uncertainty surrounding AO3’s return have been difficult, and we apologize for the inconvenience.”

The Organization for Transformative Works’ platform is known for fan-created spinoff stories—often referred to as fanfic—along with related works such as fanart and “podfics.” In a posted summary of its 2025 results, the group said nearly 2.6 million AO3 works were created, with nearly 40 billion page views, and that nearly 2 million accounts have been created.

The organization’s update was met with rapid reactions from users, including online posts celebrating the return and reporting that they had received an AO3 email about a fic update.