Archive of Our Own is back after DDoS attacks shut it down

After an outage caused by distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, Archive of Our Own (AO3) is back online. The AO3 fanfiction repository is the largest in the world, and has categories that categorize both fandoms as well as the genre of the fiction. AO3 staff has worked to restore the website since Monday when the site was down.

AO3 continued to keep fans and readers updated using the site’s official Tumblr and Twitter accounts. The staff warned that users might still experience some instability issues in the next few days as the remaining problems are resolved.

“We may need to do some work to optimize our shiny new Cloudflare setup — we’ll keep you updated on any issues or downtime,” the update post on both Twitter and Tumblr reads.

AO3 hosts over 57,000 fandoms and millions of works by fans. This site is a literary success, winning the Hugo Award 2019 for Best Related Works.

The outage — and the work of AO3 staff to restore the site as soon as possible — has incentivized some readers to donate to the siteYou can tweet your appreciation (or at least a couple of words)

Some bad actors take advantage of the generosity. A tweet from the AO3 account reads: “Attention! Someone using the name AO3__Status (note the second underscore) is impersonating this account and attempting to scam AO3 users out of money.”

AO3 will continue to update users on the site’s status; it’s possible that it could go down again. Fans can enjoy saucy fiction or upload their works for now. However, they must be cautious if they decide to donate.