Fan-fiction site Archive of Our Own could be offline for up to 4 weeks

The popular fan-fiction site Archive of Our Own (AO3) is expected to be offline for up to 4 weeks due to routine maintenance, with the possibility of being restored in a degraded state sooner. The site's status page reported millions of views and panicked commentary on social media after the announcement. The outage is not related to the recent PHP Armageddon, as AO3 is built on the Ruby on Rails framework. OTW and AO3 did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The site relies on volunteers and donations to keep it afloat, and its passionate user base is likely feeling the impact of the outage. The founder summit promotion at the end of the article is unrelated to the AO3 outage.

AO3 is a project of the nonprofit Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) and allows fans to publish and read stories about their favorite characters and worlds.