Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Kayleigh Donaldson | Miscellaneous | October 30, 2026
Archive of Our Own is down. The fanfiction site, widely regarded to be the best in the business, is currently down for maintenance. That’s not unusual. Many of us have been irritated to find our special reading time interrupted by such things. But this time, the wait could be far longer than anticipated. Thanks to a “security incident”, AO3 is undergoing a much-needed clean out. “We estimate that service restoration for #AO3 will take around 2 weeks but it could be up to 4 weeks. We are hopeful that we will be able to bring the site back up in a degraded state sooner,” said the official AO3 updates Twitter account.
A month?!
As you can imagine, readers are not happy with the news.
Ao3 is down
— ゆっき (@yukii91218.bsky.social) October 29, 2026 at 10:31 PM
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Horror story in 2 words
— Shrimp 🦐🍤 (@seasaltshrimp.bsky.social) October 29, 2026 at 7:19 PM
AO3 down
Rating: Explicit
Relationship: ao3/everyone
Additional Tags: edging, involuntary celibacy, chastity kink, sadism, orgasm control
— sarahquaint (@sarahquaint.bsky.social) October 29, 2026 at 8:30 PM
Reader links include comments and props so you don’t have to miss out on feedback!
And when AO3 is back up, use our Post to AO3 feature to get your story up right away 😌
— Ellipsus (@ellipsus.com) October 29, 2026 at 2:21 PM
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AO3 could return sooner, albeit with limited functionality, but there’s a strong chance that we may have to use our imaginations or read actual books for a month instead. This is deeply inconvenient to me, who has a five-hour hair appointment to sit through. It’s harder to hold a book when you’re lying with your head in a sink.
For the uninitiated, AO3 is a nonprofit, fan-run archive dedicated to “transformative works”. You can find fanfic on basically everything in AO3’s archives, and you can find any niche you desire because their search functions are extremely specific. It’s a sharp contrast to sites like Wattpad and fanfiction.net, which feel like the Wild West of fic and are often impossible to sieve through for what you want. The idea of going back to reading ff.net is just unthinkable.
Fans are mobilizing to withstand the potential fic drought, setting up Google Drives for sharing fics and going back to our fandom roots before algorithms ruined everything (I swear, the internet would be so much better if we all went back to LiveJournal before the Russian bots took it over.) Maybe it’s time to go touch some grass, whatever that is.
