On Oct. 29, popular fan fiction site Archive of Our Own (known as AO3) shut down unexpectedly following a security incident and potential data breach. And since then, fanfic readers and writers have been feeling its absence — and looking for new places to read their favorite works. “I’ve been itching to read some fanfics now that it’s been almost a year since the series finale of Stranger Things, but I can’t, and it’s killing me,” University of Central Florida student MJ, 20, tells Her Campus. “God forbid a girl want to pretend the awful ending of her favorite show never happened!”
If you’re unfamiliar with AO3, it’s an online space for user-made fan works, including fan fiction and fan art. It functions as a one-stop shop for over 18.4 million works across more than 82,900 fandoms — including full self-published novels, one-shots (a complete, standalone story contained within a single chapter or installment), and X reader stories (a type of fan fiction where you, the reader, are placed directly into the narrative as the main character).
AO3 is also home to over 11 million users, all of whom were thrown for a loop when, on Oct. 29, AO3 announced that it would be down for maintenance for two to four weeks. A day later, on Oct. 30, AO3 clarified that the shutdown was due to “detected evidence of a security incident,” but that no AO3 data, including the authors’ works, had been deleted.
While a fan fiction site outage doesn’t seem like a massive deal, for many readers and writers, it is. Adrienne*, a junior at UCF, used AO3 “every other day” before the outage to check in on the works she has bookmarked — and reads them if they’ve been updated. Since then, she says she’s been struggling. “I use AO3 like stress relief,” the 20-year-old tells Her Campus. “So, having a sudden long outage has been difficult.
So, where are all these fan fiction readers and writers going in the meantime?
Some are going back to the ancient texts.
While AO3 is shut down, many readers and writers, such as Florida State University junior Brooke*, are getting their fan fiction fix on other popular, similar sites, like Wattpad. “It’s just sad and heartbreaking to see these authors and artists have to push back their work and scramble to find alternatives,” the 21-year-old tells Her Campus.
Created in 2006, Wattpad is (essentially) AO3 before AO3, as the ladder was created in 2008. In light of the AO3 shutdown, Wattpad announced that they would go ad-free on the weekend of Oct. 30 to welcome AO3 users and be their temporary home until the site was running again.
Outside of Wattpad, readers like 20-year-old UCF student Jessica* have been accessing other popular sites that were created before AO3. “[I’ve been using] fanfiction.net, Tumblr, and even finding “texting stories” on TikTok,” she says.
However, despite the popularity of these other sites, many AO3 loyalists like MJ aren’t totally convinced. “The content is hit or miss, and it’s so much harder to find well-written stuff on there [in my opinion],” she says. “I also feel like I’m using sites for teenagers. I’m a grown woman, give me my AO3 back, please!”
Others are finding fan fiction on Google Drive.
While sites like Wattpad and fanfiction.net are similar alternatives to AO3, some readers and writers are getting their fan fiction from a pretty unique source: Google Drive. During the AO3 outage, many users have downloaded PDFs of fan fiction and uploaded them to massive Google Drives, oftentimes even organizing them by fandom, ship, and other popular filters.
Readers like UCF senior Antonella, 21, mainly find these mega-drives through social media platforms like TikTok and X (formerly Twitter). “I have deliberately looked for the smaller drives that are fandom-specific,” she says, saying that these drives have “handled the situation better” as opposed to AI-powered sites that may profit from authors’ free work during the outage.
Some AO3 writers are giving updates directly.
If course, for writers on the platform, the outage means more than just not being able to keep up with the latest chapter: it’s a loss of community. Sam, a 20-year-old at the University of Utah, says that the outage has been incredibly hard. On the day of the outage, they were ready to share a new chapter of one of their works, as well as a one-shot they were working on for a while. But, sadly, they were unable to post in time. “I’m sad I can’t post for my readers, especially because I love writing and I’m so grateful for the little following I’ve garnered,” they say. “I keep accidentally opening AO3 pages and getting hit with the ‘The archive is currently down for maintenance’ message.”
During this time, though, writers like Sam have continued to communicate with some of their readers — including keeping them updated on their works. “I’ve sent some of my closest friends (as in, my readers who became my friends in the online spaces for our fandom) PDFs of my one-shot so that they can read it instead of waiting so many weeks,” they say. “I’m [also] trying to write as much as I can in the downtime so that I can have many updates to my fics ready for my readers and make the shutdown period worth it.”
AO3 is expected to come back online in the coming days — so readers and writers don’t have to stick with their second (and third) choice platforms for long. After all, according to MJ, “There is literally no one-to-one replacement for AO3; it’s perfect.”
*Names have been changed.