Fanfiction writers and readers are mourning. Archive of Our Own, or AO3, had to shut down without warning due to a hacking event. The site that boasts 11 million registered users and 18 million works of fanfic might be down for weeks.
Fanfiction readers are legion, and these works have become a major force in reading culture. As English professor Anne Jamison, author of Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World, pointed out to The New York Times, AO3 can offer the only LGBTQ+ content available to readers in countries where queer relationships are criminalized.
Fanfics have even become traditional publishing bestsellers:
- Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James (Twilight fanfic)
- The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood (Star Wars fanfic)
- Alchemised by SenLin Yu (Harry Potter fanfic; needless to say, a thousand boos to JK Rowling)
The response to the shutdown is exactly what you’d expect from an entrenched fandom community, with one X user invoking the almighty Mamdani to help bring back the good-good. Others are scouting out resources and downloaded fanfic libraries to help prop up their community during the outage.
AO3 might be down for up to four weeks with the possibility of bringing the site back in a “degraded state.” Reportedly, no data has been deleted as a result of the security incident, but AO3 hasn’t ruled out a stolen user database.
Rebecca Tushnet, an AO3 founder (and legal scholar at Harvard Law School), told The Times that the team is prioritizing safety over speed.