THE CRUNCH
Archive of Our Own (AO3), the nonprofit fan-fiction site, went offline for what was meant to be routine overnight maintenance and now says it could stay down for two to four weeks. In a statement, the site said it had detected evidence of a security incident and was still in the early stages of determining its scope, with the site remaining down while it investigates.
The Organisation for Transformative Works (OTW), the nonprofit behind AO3, said it does not currently believe the user database was stolen but cannot rule it out. The database holds account information that may include usernames, email addresses, IP addresses and hashed passwords. As a precaution, AO3 advised users to change their passwords on any other sites where they reused the same one.
Some fans suspected a link to last week's "PHP Armageddon", when tools from OpenAI and Google Wiz uncovered two critical flaws in PHP, the language running behind-the-scenes software on about 70% of the internet. But AO3 runs on Ruby on Rails rather than PHP, so the outage is unlikely to be related. OTW and AO3 did not respond to requests for comment.
The announcement drew an immediate reaction: within two hours, posts on AO3's status page had racked up millions of views across social media. The site's status account said it was hopeful the service could return in a degraded state sooner than the full estimate.