There’s an often-memed joke in fandom and fan fiction spaces: “the AO3 author curse.” The superstition is defined on Urban Dictionary as “an occurrence in which a fan fiction author (typically writing on archiveofourown.org) gets into an extremely sticky situation, but said author’s first priority is their fan fic.” This might look like new installments being posted with notes like, “my beta reader is still in jail,” or “I was mugged.”
It’s impossible to assess the validity of these claims. Bela Rivas, a fanfic author from Sydney, Australia, can speak firsthand to her own experience: Her most popular fan fiction was finished and published from a hospital bed.
One morning at 4 a.m., she woke up feeling like she was drowning in blood. She was rushed to the hospital while vomiting blood and diagnosed with a hemorrhage, a complication from a recent tonsillectomy. Once she was stable, she returned to writing the “Buddie” (the ship name for Buck and Eddie from the ABC procedural drama “9-1-1”) story she had been working on.
“It was a way to think about anything other than the circumstances that I was in,” Rivas says. “Rather than sitting there and being worried, or rather than just spiraling, I think writing became for me such a way to deal with my own anxiety.”
The “author curse” is the butt of an internet joke. But the phrase belies what fan fiction and fandom can mean to its participants. Readers describe fan fic as an escape, a source of joy and community. Writers call it an accessible creative outlet or a way to process complex feelings.
So what happens when one of the platforms that makes it all possible goes dark?
Archive Of Our Own is currently experiencing its biggest outage ever since it launched to the public in November 2009, says Rebecca Tushnet, a founder of the Organization for Transformative Works, the non-profit behind AO3, and co-chair of its legal committee. On Oct. 29, the organization became aware of a “security problem” on AO3, Tushnet says, which is home to more than 18 million stories. No data from AO3 was deleted, the platform said in a statement. While it doesn’t believe the user database, which contains usernames, email addresses and IP addresses, was stolen, AO3 was “unable to rule it out.”
Finally, the devastating blow: “Our current expectation is that AO3 will be down for a minimum of two weeks; however, it could take up to four weeks.”
“It would be like if Netflix or HBO Max was to go down for two to four weeks,” AO3 user Brandon Frye, 26 of Columbus, Ohio, says.
What Happened to AO3?
On Oct. 29, Berklie Novak-Stolz, 29 of northern Alabama, had reached page 16 of the AO3 fan fics tagged to hurt/comfort, a popular fan fiction trope. When she reached the bottom of the page, she hit “next” and received a pop-up saying the archive was down for maintenance.
Temporary AO3 outages are common. The OTW has an X page for status updates with more than one million followers. At the time, maintenance was scheduled to take around 12 hours. No matter for Novak-Stolz, though. She just turned to her cache of saved fics. AO3 has a download feature, allowing readers to save fics in PDF, ePub and more formats.
Then she got a text from a coworker: “Did you see the news?” The question was accompanied by a screenshot of the status update that service restoration is expected to take two weeks.
That time estimation comes from exercising caution amid the “security incident,” which has not been explained further. The OTW has zero employees and is run by a team of about 1,000 volunteers.
“We are making sure that it is solved. This just requires being very careful and not bringing anything back until we’re confident it’s been patched,” Tushnet tells TODAY.com.
‘A Way For Me to Deal With Myself’
The internet, of course, reacted to the potential monthlong outage with memes. Frye posted a video of himself in a Halloween costume inspired by the AO3 outage, wearing pipe cleaners shaped like the site’s logo as a headband and papers that read “Error 404” and “Not Found.”
“I initially was like, ‘Two to four weeks is a very, very long time,’” Novak-Stolz says. “I know that for a lot of people, myself included, fan fic is like a really good escape, especially because the world’s like an on fire dumpster at the moment. These are my silly little stories.”
The outage has also reminded readers that it’s more than that.
“One of the best things about fandom is it has a very low barrier to entry, and you can find people who like the same things you do and are interested in helping you become a better storyteller,” Tushnet says.
Novak-Stolz recalls that after the death of her brother four years ago, she turned to reading and writing fan fiction, often about the characters from “Supernatural.”
“I’m really good at being able to sit down and think, ‘This character’s mad, but why? What’s the root of that?’ … It’s a way for me to deal with myself, too.”
Bela Rivas AO3 fan fiction writer
“The kindness from strangers on the internet is what helped me get through that time,” she says.
Right after he passed, she says she spent 16 hours reading on the site in one day. Now, she clocks in around two to three hours of screen time on the site per day.
“I didn’t want to be alone with my thoughts, so I was like, let me put someone else’s thoughts in my head,” she says.
“For a lot of people, it’s just like a place separate from everything else,” she adds.
Rivas started writing fan fiction as an adult in 2021 after breaking up with her longterm boyfriend and coming out as queer. After her dog had surgery, she spent most nights sleeping on the floor downstairs with him and rewatched “Teen Wolf,” inspiring her first stories. She’s also written for “Supernatural” and most popularly, for “9-1-1,” an ABC procedural about first responders that’s currently airing its 10th season.
Many of her 60-plus published fan fics are coming-out stories. She says they allow her to process her own experience through characters she can connect with.
It also allows her to delve into material from the canon that feels unexplored. For example, firefighter Eddie Diaz, one half of one of AO3’s most popular new ships, is not canonically queer in the show “9-1-1.” But he is canonically struggling with what masculinity looks like and dating feeling like performance, Rivas says. He’s also Latino and dealing with religious guilt — “that’s very me,” Rivas says.
“There are metaphors that I’ve used repeatedly because they’re how it felt for me,” Rivas says. “I’ve had Eddie Diaz in different fics talk about there being a door in his head, and he kept shutting it. … And one day it opened a little bit further and he couldn’t close it again, and when the door opened, it was actually just sunshine. He’d spent so long in the dark.”
‘We Are Going to Get Through This Together’
When AO3 has temporarily gone down in the past, Novak-Stolz has posted about it on TikTok to her more than 300,000 followers. This time, she did something different. Her Oct. 29 video opened with a meme from “Supernatural” alongside the outage announcement. She was in the middle of making the video when she thought of creating a public Google Drive for people to upload their own collections of downloaded fan fictions.
“You know what, we are going to get through this together as a community with the power of friendship and mutual aid,” she said in the video.
“I stopped mid video, created the Drive, put the link for it in my LinkTree, and then finished the video,” she tells TODAY.com. “I actually haven’t been able to upload any of the fics I have saved because it exploded so fast.”
Direct clicks from her LinkTree alone number more than 250,000, she says. Links to her Drive could also be found across social media comments sections. On Election Day, Nov. 3, the official TikTok account for the Democratic party posted a photo edit of her Drive, which was titled “Fanfic Emergency Fund,” with the caption, “streets are saying if you vote blue AO3 will come back.”
But the act of uploading content from AO3 in other online spaces has come with backlash. In Novak-Stolz’s own Drive, she initially had permissions set that allowed everyone to be an editor, and she says some bad actors uploaded potentially dangerous links. And in addition to fan fic Google Drives, sites masquerading as AO3 have cropped up, claiming to be a re-creation of the platform’s content. Some users have reportedly encountered sites claiming to sell audiobook versions of fan fics.
When Rivas first heard of the plan for collective sharing of downloaded fan fics, she was initially “completely in favor of it.” She then heard counterarguments from other authors who didn’t want their content uploaded to Drive, citing the site’s lack of content warnings and the possibility of data being scraped by AI.
“I think that people who don’t want it should be respected,” Rivas says, later adding that she believes the “liabilities, both morally and legally, are just too high.”
Asked for the OTW’s stance on the republishing of fan fictions into places like Google Drive, Tushnet says AO3 authors have copyright over any original material they contribute when writing a fan fiction. The OTW primarily focuses on preventing the monetization of fan fiction. But with the site down, some authors “just want to know where their things are, and we think that is completely reasonable,” Tushnet says.
“There is a difference between saving something for yourself and then putting it online for the entire world to see, and we hope people will be respectful of authors’ wishes,” Tushnet says.
Both Novak-Stolz and Rivas have received extreme backlash and harassment on social media.
Novak-Stolz’s initial Drive is now defunct, but she and 30 other people built a new one with an organizational system and altered permission settings. She says she’s spoken directly with authors who didn’t want their work in the Drive, and there’s a process in place to remove them.
Novak-Stolz says she’s been told she should delete her account and quoted a hate comment she received that mentioned her brother’s death. Still, she says she doesn’t regret making the Drive.
“Because I know how important it is to have these communities, because I would not have made it through any of the bad, truly terrible times of my life without these communities, without these works, without these like, silly little fictional guys,” she says. “But also the opposition for it, it’s kept me up at night.”
Meanwhile, when Rivas posted on X about the hate authors who have criticized uploading their work elsewhere are receiving, she says she received comments telling her to delete everything and “no one will miss you.”
“When the outage first happened … there was this idea of like, ‘Oh, we’re going to try and get so much done in this time so we have heaps to post when it comes back,” Rivas says. “And then it pretty abruptly turned into, ‘Wow, I’m feeling so dehumanized by this and I’m feeling so demotivated to write.’
“Now I’m seeing a lot of people I know who’ve been writing for years saying, ‘I don’t know if I’m going to continue doing this because this sense of connection that I had feels like it’s gone,’” she adds.
She says she’s not giving up on that sense of community, and she won’t stop posting stories. Through writing fan fiction she’s become best friends with people across the world and grown more secure in her sense of self and her abilities.
“There is that community,” she says. “I really believe in that and I really want that to stay, and I hope that that isn’t something that’s too damaged by this. I hope that there’s a middle ground to be found in understanding that we’re not coming from a place of disrespecting readers either, or not wanting to share with them.
“Of course I want readers to read what I wrote, why else would I have written it?” she adds. “But I also don’t want to be disconnected from it.
“The most popular fic I’ve ever written was written during one of the scariest and worst periods of my life, and the idea that people take it and say, ‘This isn’t even yours anymore because you published it. This doesn’t connect to you. This is mine. I own it. I can do whatever I want with it.’ It’s like, I guess you can. I can’t stop you, but how sad?”
Tushnet says OTW’s primary concern at this time is protecting users from scammers and emphasizing internet safety. She advises users to be “extremely careful” with any links they click on.
“When you’re upset and worried is when you’re most vulnerable, and scammers no that,” Tushnet says. “We just hope people will give us a little bit of time. There was no data lost. It’s all coming back. Just hang on.”
