Archive of Our Own is down, and it could be offline for weeks

UPDATE: Jul. 12, 2023, 10:50 a.m. AEST Good news! Archive of Our Own is back up as of Tuesday afternoon U.S. time, thanks to its new protections from cybersecurity company Cloudflare. It will take some time for AO3 to optimise its new setup, and a few features have been temporarily disabled while it works to get everything back on track. But most of the website's functionality is back, so you can finally return to your 100+ open tabs of fics. Original story follows:

Archive of Our Own (AO3) is currently undergoing a DDoS attack, which has kept the popular fan fiction website down for hours. It's a difficult time for everyone, but we will get through it together.

AO3's official status update Twitter account first acknowledged the outage on Monday morning U.S. time, though its volunteer staff were then still investigating the cause. Five hours later AO3 confirmed the website was the victim of a DDoS attack, and it is still working to counter it.

DoS attacks, or denial-of-service attacks, are a common tactic used by malicious actors aimed at knocking websites offline. This is done by flooding the website with more requests than it can handle, overloading its servers and making it unable to deal with legitimate requests. DDoS attacks are distributed denial-of-service attacks, where the deluge of traffic comes from multiple sources. 

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Who is behind the DDoS attack on AO3?

The attack has been claimed by hacktivist group Anonymous Sudan, and comes as part of a campaign of similar DDoS attacks on U.S. organisations. AO3 is run by the U.S. non-profit Organization for Transformative Works. Referring to AO3 in particular, Anonymous Sudan further stated that it is "against all forms of degeneracy, and the site is full of disgusting smuts and other LGBTQ+ and NSFW things."

However, AO3 has warned against taking its attacker's claims regarding motivation at face value. Cybersecurity experts believe Anonymous Sudan may actually be linked to Russia, with its true aim being to disrupt and stir up division in the West. 

"A group presenting themselves as a collective of religiously and politically motivated hackers has claimed responsibility for the attack," wrote AO3's Twitter account. "Experts do not believe they are honest about their motivation, so we urge caution in believing any reasoning they provide for targeting AO3."

"We do not condone anti-Muslim sentiments under any circumstances," it continued. "Additionally, to reiterate: cybersecurity experts believe the group claiming responsibility is lying about their affiliation and reasons for attacking websites. View the group's statements with skepticism."

Though Anonymous Sudan initially claimed the attack would continue for up to 24 hours, it has since issued a ransom demand, threatening to maintain attacking AO3 for "weeks" unless paid $30,000 in Bitcoin.

Unfortunately for them, AO3 is an incredibly poor target for extortion. The fan fiction website is entirely funded by donations and staffed by volunteers, so it's unlikely it could pay the ransom even if it were so inclined. 

When will AO3 be back up?

Right now there's no telling how long AO3 might be down for. It could be offline for weeks if its purported attackers are to be believed, but hopefully the website's volunteers manage to fight off the DDoS attack sooner than that. AO3 is home to over 11 million fanworks in over 57,000 different fandoms, and in 2019 won the Hugo Award for Best Related Work.

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The good news is that the attack on AO3 isn't a data breach, so your email, password, and questionable reading history are still safe from prying eyes. The bad news is that it may be a while before you can get back to devouring your favourite 60k hurt/comfort WIP.