Archive of Our Own (AO3) is currently down after being attacked by DDOS

Archive of Our Own (AO3) is currently down after being attacked by DDOS.

A DDoS attack occurs when a malicious actor floods a website with service requests in order to incapacitate it. The official Twitter account for AO3 first acknowledged technical issues early Monday morning before, roughly seven hours later, the account confirmed that the website was down due to a DDoS attack. At the time of publication the website is still down.

AO3’s official status update Twitter account first acknowledged the outage on Monday morning(opens in a new tab) 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(opens in a new tab), 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. “We have not been contacted by anyone claiming credit for the DDoS as of this time, so there is nothing we can say for certain,” a representative of the Organization for Transformative Works told Polygon in an email. The representative added that the organization will continue to keep readers updated with AO3’s Tumblr and Twitter accounts.

AO3 is an open-source website run by the non-profit Organization for Transformative Works. Founded in 2008, the website allows its users to upload and read fan-written works. It has since gone on to be a leading repository for fanfiction and hosts over 11 million works across 57,840 different fandoms, according to one of its archived webpages. In addition to being large, the website won literary acclaim when it won the 2019 Hugo Award for Best Related Work.