Archive of Our Own (AO3) is down due to a DDoS attack

Archive of Our Own (AO3), a leading repository of fan-written works, went down on Monday following a distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. Representatives of A03 did not give a timeline for when service to the website will be restored, but said that system administrators were working on “countermeasures” as of Monday afternoon.

DDoS is a type of attack that occurs when an actor malicious launches a DDoS. floods a website with service requestsIn order to disable it. Twitter’s official AO3 account acknowledged technical difficulties early on Monday before confirming, approximately seven hours after, that the website had been disabled. down due to a DDoS attack. As of the publication date, the website remains down.

“We have not been contacted by anyone claiming credit for the DDoS as of this time, so there is nothing we can say for certain,” a representative of the Organization for Transformative Works told Polygon in an email. The representative added that the organization will continue to keep readers updated with AO3’s Tumblr and Twitter accounts.

AO3 (Open-Source Website) is a website that’s run by the nonprofit Organization for Transformative Works. The website was founded in 2008. It allows users to read and upload fan-written work. The website has grown to become the leading fanfiction repository, with over 11 million fanfictions across 57840 different fandoms. This website, which is huge in size, also won literary recognition when it was awarded the Hugo Award of 2019 for the Best Related Work.