Archive of Our Own will go down today, but don’t freak out

abdulmanannet77@gmail.comJanuary 21, 2026

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Archive of Our Own will go down today, but don’t freak out

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Archive of Our Own (AO3) will be offline for more than half a day on Wednesday to implement some updates. Users of the popular fanfiction platform are as calm as expected.

Fan fiction fans were warned about AO3’s outage this week well in advance, with its official Status X account offering a warning on Monday. A yellow banner at the top of the AO3 website also alerted users of the planned outage, ensuring that those not on X also received full notification.

The scheduled downtime is intended to allow AO3 to implement improvements to its bookmarks and series search functions, including adding the ability to filter and sort works by word count. Other updates include fixing bookmark search results when a work’s tags contain letters and numbers, and ensuring that series presentations cannot use tags that were only used on drafts.

However, this means that the Hugo Award-winning cornucopia of fanfiction will be in decline while such upgrades take place. AO3 states that the outage will last approximately 15 hours, leaving fanfiction readers without material for much of Wednesday.

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The good news is that AO3 will return sometime and will theoretically be better than ever. The bad news is that unless you’ve already downloaded your favorite fics or are willing to dig into alternative platforms, you’ll just have to endure our harsh reality without your comfort hurting/comforting WIP for a while.

When will AO3 be back?

The AO3 outage is expected to begin at 3:00 a.m. ET/12:00 a.m. PT on Wednesday and is expected to last approximately 15 hours. As such, AO3 will return around 6:00 p.m. ET / 3:00 p.m. PT at the earliest.

Of course, it’s possible that AO3 will be available sooner if updates go smoother than expected. He might also be out for a bit longer if the AO3 team encounters any complications. Your best bet is to continue checking in at its scheduled return time and follow the official Tumblr, Bluesky, X, or AO3 status page for updates.

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While this week’s downtime is notable for its length, AO3 veterans have endured various outages over the years, including a DDoS attack in 2023 that took the beloved archive offline for nearly two days. It has become a unifying tradition for the AO3 community to use social media during this downtime, getting creative to humorously lament the event and commiserate with each other during these difficult times. Fortunately, such periods of desolation have not lasted until now and are not expected to last any time soon.