What's Happening To AO3 Right Now?

What's happening to AO3 right now?

As you may have noticed already, Archive of Our Own is currently down. This is temporary, but unfortunately we now know that this is much deeper than we thought.

AO3 is currently the victim of a DDoS* attack orchestrated by "Anonymous Sudan"

*Distributed Denial-of-Service Attack is a cyber-attack in which the attacker strives to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host connected to a network

Why? Because AO3 is home to thousands of LGBTQIA+ content and lots of NSFW content.

They're doing this as an Anti-LGBTQ+ attack. If they're doing this for or from America specifically, we're not sure. But this is what AO3 is facing at this time.

What can we do?

Spread the word. Spread the fucking word.

And PLEASE, whatever you do...

Stop using the Archive of Our Own website at this time.

The moderators, showrunners, and service providers all need to repair the damage done by this group. The amount of data flooding in from people trying to log in will cause more problems.

Keep yourselves off of the website.

Yes, the site is accessible but PLEASE do not use the site until they give the all clear.

They're still trying to fight off this DDoS attack. If you overwhelm the servers with your requests (ie. next chapter, opening bookmarks, etc.), it will be harder for them to get it done.

For anyone that needs further confirmation:

Please make sure you check the date and time of posts like this, too.

As far as I am currently aware, AO3 officials have not yet given the all clear.

(Posted July 10, 2023, 6:50pm CST)