Archive of Our Own faces extended outage following security incident

The fan-fiction platform Archive of Our Own (AO3) has suspended its services following a security incident. While the outage was initially expected to last 12 hours for maintenance, the Organization for Transformative Works has updated its estimate, stating the site could remain offline for two to four weeks.

The organization is currently in the early stages of investigating the scope of the intrusion. While officials have assured users that the archive itself, including stories, bookmarks, and kudos, remains intact, they are unable to rule out the possibility that the user database was compromised. This database contains usernames, email addresses, IP addresses, and hashed passwords.

Donor information is stored on a separate system and is reported to be safe. As a precaution, the team has advised users to update any passwords that may have been reused from the site. AO3 expects to return to service in a degraded or read-only state with potential intermittent downtime as the investigation continues.