Archive of Our Own ( AO3 ) is a widely popular website where fans post and read stories about their favorite characters and worlds. Today, this community has received some bad news: after what was supposed to be a routine nightly maintenance, the website may be offline for nearly a month.

The status page for AO3 states: "We expect the service for AO3 to be restored in about 2 weeks, but it may take up to 4 weeks at most. We hope to be able to bring the website back online in a degraded state sooner than that."

AO3 is a project of the non-profit organization Organization for Transformative Works ( OTW ). The organization relies on volunteers and donations to maintain its website operations. Due to the extremely enthusiastic user base, within two hours of this announcement being released, the posts on the status page received millions of views on social media and sparked a large number of panicked comments.

Some fans may suspect that this issue is related to last week's “PHP Armageddon”. At that time, tools from OpenAI and Google Wiz discovered two serious vulnerabilities in PHP; PHP is the programming language that supports about 70% of the website back-end software on the internet. However, AO3 does not belong to this majority of websites. Instead, this site uses another set of frameworks: Ruby, on, and Rails. Therefore, it is unlikely that this malfunction is related to them.

OTW and AO3 have not immediately responded to requests for comments. If we obtain more information, we will update this report.