Archive of Our Own, one of the world’s largest fan fiction websites, could remain offline for up to a month after what its operators described as a security incident. The platform hosts stories inspired by works including “Harry Potter,” “Twilight” and “Heated Rivalry,” as well as content related to celebrities and K-pop groups.
AO3 said on Tumblr that it had detected evidence of an intrusion and was still determining the incident’s scope. The organization assured its 12 million users that no data had been lost, saying that works, bookmarks and kudos remained safe.
Rebecca Tushnet, a founder of the Organization for Transformative Works, which operates AO3, said an all-volunteer team was investigating how the attacker gained access and working to ensure that the method used had been removed.
The archive contains 18.8 million works across 83,000 fandoms and is operated entirely by volunteers. The outage has prompted increased traffic to archived versions of the site on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine, described an outage of this length as nearly unheard-of and said the resulting traffic was placing a heavy load on the archive. Mehdi Daoudi, an internet-resilience expert at LogicMonitor, said service disruptions typically last from a few minutes to a few hours, although they can have many causes.
Sources: The New York Times Technology.