{
  "id": 17123479,
  "title": "Fan fiction site Archive of Our Own could be offline for up to 4 weeks",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/10/29/fan-fiction-site-archive-of-our-own-could-be-offline-for-up-to-4-weeks",
  "topic": "tech",
  "section": "Tech",
  "published": "2026-10-29T20:43:56.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "TechCrunch",
    "slug": "techcrunch",
    "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/29/fan-fiction-site-archive-of-our-own-could-be-offline-for-up-to-4-weeks/"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "Archive of Our Own (AO3), a beloved fan fiction website, may be offline for up to four weeks due to maintenance issues. After a scheduled overnight maintenance, AO3 announced it could be offline for nearly a month. The site's status page estimates restoration will take around two weeks, but it could extend to four weeks. The nonprofit Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), which runs AO3, relies on volunteers and donations to sustain the platform. Within two hours of the announcement, AO3's status page received millions of views and generated much concern on social media. The outage may not be related to last week's \"PHP Armageddon,\" as AO3 uses a different framework, Ruby on Rails. OTW and AO3 have not yet commented on the situation, but updates will be provided if more information becomes available.",
  "summary": "Archive of Our Own, the popular online home of fan fiction readers and writers, has bad news for its community.",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}