AO3 has been offline since October 29 after a breach, and clone sites are copying stories. Users who reused their password should change it now.
Archive of Our Own, the huge fan fiction site known as AO3, has been offline since October 29 after a security breach. While it is down, copycat sites have copied writers' stories, and at least one sold AI-made audiobooks of them. If you have an AO3 account, your login details may be at risk.
On October 30, AO3 said it had found evidence of a security incident and was working on a fix. It also said no data had been deleted from its library of fan-written stories. A later update said the work is still in progress and that the original estimate of two to four weeks is still on track.
Soon after the outage began, clone sites such as AO3.life appeared. They seem to have copied stories from AO3 without permission. On AO3.life, many were turned into AI-generated audiobooks and listed for sale. Some of the largest clones have since been shut down after a flood of takedown notices.
Anyone with an AO3 account could be affected. The team has not fully ruled out that its user database was stolen. That database can hold usernames, email addresses, IP addresses and hashed passwords. A hashed password is a scrambled version of the real one, which is harder to use but not always impossible to crack.
Writers face a second problem. Their work can be copied and sold by strangers. This has happened before. In 2024, Etsy sellers turned works from sites like AO3 into physical books, some priced as high as $100.
AO3 does not collect real names, so those are not in the database. Donor information is stored separately. Readers who never reused their AO3 password elsewhere have less to worry about, though a unique password is still a good habit.
The alert box above lists the steps. The most urgent is changing any password you reused from AO3. Also treat emails that mention AO3 with care, since scammers often borrow big news stories.
AO3 has not given an exact return date. It is not known who carried out the attack. There is no official confirmation that AI played a role. Co-founder Naomi Novik told CNN that AI companies' irresponsibility has put much of the tech world under pressure at once, which is especially hard on a volunteer-run site. AO3 hosts over 18 million works across more than 83,000 fandoms, so the stakes for its community are large.
If you reused your AO3 password anywhere else, change it today, and watch for copies of your writing on clone sites.
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