The OTW and its projects have been unavailable at different times since July 10. We provide an update and also celebrate a new milestone! Read more at https://otw.news/71383b
As of now AO3 is back up. However, in the past hour the OTW website and the donation platform have become inaccessible. We believe it is part of the same attack first made on the Archive. We will be providing updates via this account.
We also want to alert fans that on Twitter someone is using the name AO3_Status_ (note the second underscore). If you are on Twitter, please block and report this account.
The fake account is impersonating our service status account and attempting to scam AO3 users out of money. Fans on all platforms should be wary of anyone soliciting money on behalf of the OTW or its projects at this time. (The real donation form is currently down due to a DDoS.)
Open Doors and Legal Advocacy pages are also not available at this time. Our Fanlore project is being worked on and should be back today. Our Transformative Works and Cultures site has not been affected. Thank you for being patient while we restore services!
17:10 UTC on July 13 2023
The OTW website is now up and stable, and the Elections, Legal, Open Doors and Fanhackers webpages are also back. Fanlore is also accessible.
However as of right now the donations form is not yet connecting.
There is also a post at AO3 regarding the downtime issues, summarizing past information released and what is currently disabled.
The Archive is experiencing some issues (as many of you have noticed).
It looks like the Archive is under a DDoS attack causing the servers to fall over. Our volunteer sysadmins are working on countermeasures. Please be patient with us, we’ll be back!
A DDoS attack is when an attacker attempts to knock a site offline by overwhelming it with requests. Data is not compromised in a DDoS attack, so there is no need to change your password at this time or worry about your works being lost.
A group presenting themselves as a collective of religiously and politically motivated hackers has claimed responsibility for the DDoS attack. This group has attacked other sites before, including those of government organizations and large corporations. However, cybersecurity experts do not believe the group is honest about their motivation, so we urge caution in believing any reasoning this group provides for targeting AO3.
As part of our efforts to help keep the site up, you might find that you get “Retry later” errors more often when searching or filtering works or bookmarks. Don’t worry, just go a little slower, or try again in a few minutes! These are temporary measures. Normal use of the site is fine – you don’t have to avoid using AO3 if it’s currently up for you.
Our volunteers are continuing to work hard on this issue! We appreciate your patience and support in the meantime.
Date: 22:43 UTC July 10, 2023
We’ve changed our approach slightly, so you might now see error messages other than “Retry later,” such as 429 (too many requests), 400 (bad request), or 503 (service unavailable).
Please do continue to access the site if it’s up for you, and feel free to download some works for offline reading in case of further downtime!
We’d also like to take a moment to reiterate that cybersecurity experts believe the group claiming responsibility for the ongoing DDoS attack is lying about their affiliation and reasons for attacking websites. We strongly encourage you to be skeptical of any statements from this group.
