Fan fiction site AO3 is offline and could take up to four weeks to return

[Isla]

One of the internet's biggest fan fiction sites has gone dark. Engadget reports that Archive of Our Own, known as AO3, has been taken offline by the Organization for Transformative Works, the non-profit that runs it

The site went down for what was meant to be about 12 hours of planned maintenance. The organisation now says restoring service will take around two weeks, but could take up to four. It may bring the site back sooner in a reduced state, which could mean taking it offline again later

The organisation had logged problems with email notifications, search, reading history and listings on 23 and 24 October. Over the previous two weeks, major PHP and TLS certificate vulnerabilities had been disclosed, and the organisation's Fanlore site was briefly shut down over the PHP flaw, although no link to AO3's outage has been confirmed

In an update, AO3 said no data had been deleted and that it does not believe any was stolen. It also pointed out that it does not collect real names and that donor data is stored in a separate, unconnected system. The site's engineers are volunteers, and the cause of the outage is still unknown

AO3 hosts millions of works and has a huge, devoted community, so a multi week outage is a big disruption. The reassurance about data is welcome, but the vague cause will worry some users. Volunteer run services do remarkable work with limited resources

Do you use AO3? And how should volunteer run sites handle security at this scale?

Fan fiction website AO3 is down, and it could take weeks to recover - Engadgetwww.engadget.com