Overview
- Operators of Archive of Our Own took the site offline after detecting a security incident on October 29 and announced a limited return on November 15 after roughly 17 days of recovery efforts.
- The site is accessible but listed as degraded and several features are turned off, including user and collection icons, external work imports, and downloads limited to HTML format.
- OTW says published works, bookmarks and kudos were not deleted and draft deletion was paused, but it cannot yet rule out access to the user database and urges users to change reused passwords.
- The organization has hired an external security firm to review systems and continues testing and remediation without releasing detailed technical findings.
- Community volunteers preserved content during the outage and OTW warned users to avoid unofficial mirrors and donation requests because copycat sites and scam attempts have appeared.