October has been a roller coaster ride for readers of the fan-supported fiction website Archive of Our Own, commonly known as AO3.
The platform now confirmed a routine glitch has escalated into a crisis.
What began as an estimated 12-hour unplanned outage has turned into a multi-week closure, leaving millions of users locked out.
The shoutdown follows repeated disruptions throughout the month.
The platform is operated by the Organisation for Transformative Works.
An update shared on Thursday, October 29, on the portal’s status page said that service restoration will take at least two weeks, possibly four.
“We estimate that service restoration for #AO3 will take around 2 weeks, but it could be up to 4 weeks,” the OTW statement reads.
“We are hopeful that we will be able to bring the site back up in a degraded state sooner.
If that does happen. There may be times when the site has to be brought down temporarily until is fully resolved,” it added.
AO3 contains millions of fan-created works that transform existing stories, movie characters, TV shows and more.
However, the platform has not detailed what caused this prolonged outage.
The OTW recorded issues with email notifications, search, history and listings between October 23 and 24 but hasn’t said a word on what issues it has been confronted with.
