Archive of Our Own, the fan-fiction site that holds 18.8 million works and a respectable share of fandom’s collective imagination, has been offline since 29 October, and the volunteers who run it say it could stay that way for up to four weeks. What began as routine overnight maintenance turned into a security incident, which is not the sort of thing anyone wants to find in the cupboard.
The Organization for Transformative Works, the non-profit behind AO3, said it had “detected evidence of a security incident” and that the site would remain down while it investigates. Its status page puts restoration at around two weeks, possibly four, and says it hopes to bring the site back in a degraded state sooner. Rebecca Tushnet, one of the OTW’s founders, told the New York Times that there had been “an intrusion”, and that the team is trying to work out the path the attacker used and make sure it has been removed.
The reassuring part first. The OTW says nothing has been deleted: the works, bookmarks and kudos are all safe, and donor information sits in a separate system that was not exposed. The less reassuring part is the user database. The OTW says it does not currently believe that database was stolen, but cannot rule it out. It holds usernames, email addresses, IP addresses and hashed passwords, so if you used your AO3 password anywhere else, now is the time to change it there. We would also treat any email claiming to be from AO3 with suspicion until the site is properly back.
One side effect is that readers have decamped to archived copies in such numbers that the director of the Wayback Machine, Mark Graham, says the surge is putting a heavy load on it. Fandom has, in effect, moved into the Internet Archive’s spare room without ringing ahead.
This is more than a fannish inconvenience. AO3 won the Hugo for Best Related Work in 2019, which makes it part of science fiction’s official history, and it is run by volunteers and paid for by donations. SFcrowsnest has been online since 1991 and has watched fan writing move house more often than a Time Lord: from mimeographed fanzines to Usenet, from GeoCities to LiveJournal, and from Tumblr’s 2018 clear-out to here. The pattern is that the community’s memory keeps resting on one kind soul’s server. If this episode persuades a few writers to keep a local copy of their own work, that will be one useful outcome.
And lest anyone think fan fiction is a small thing, consider where it can end up. Fifty Shades of Grey began life as a Twilight fan-fiction series called Master of the Universe, before the names were changed and it became one of the biggest publishing phenomena of the century. Whatever one thinks of the result, it shows how far a story posted on a fan site can travel.
In the meantime, somewhere in the world a very large number of people are being forced to write original fiction. Let us hope they at least keep the tags.
The latest official word is on the OTW’s status page. Further reporting from TechCrunch and File 770.
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