Is AO3 (Archive of Our Own) down right now?
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About AO3 (Archive of Our Own) outages
Written by the HostTracker monitoring team · updated from live probe data.
Archive of Our Own is a non-profit, volunteer-run fanfiction archive, and that funding model is directly relevant to how it behaves under load: it runs on donated infrastructure with a small operations team, so traffic spikes hit harder and are absorbed more slowly than at a commercial platform of comparable size. AO3's most recognisable failure mode is a queue or error page during a surge - a popular fandom event, a new release driving a wave of readers, or a wave of automated scraping. It has also been the target of deliberate denial-of-service attacks, which produce the same symptoms from a reader's point of view. Because the site is heavily used worldwide, an outage is usually noticed and discussed within minutes.
Common causes of AO3 (Archive of Our Own) downtime
Traffic surges around fandom events and new media releases, which arrive fast and concentrate on specific tags and works
Search and tag-index load, historically the heaviest and most failure-prone part of the site
Denial-of-service attacks, which the archive has publicly reported on more than one occasion
Scheduled maintenance and deploys performed by a small volunteer team, typically announced in advance on the archive's own channels
Not sure whether it's AO3 (Archive of Our Own) or your own connection? Read the full breakdown in our website down checker guide for a general walkthrough of diagnosing any outage, from DNS failures to expired certificates.
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Questions people ask during an outage
The live probe run on this page tests archiveofourown.org from a broad sample of HostTracker's 300+-location monitoring network - many independent networks at the same moment, rather than just your own connection. If every location fails to reach it, the outage is real and affects everyone; if only a few locations fail while most load normally, the problem is local to those regions or networks rather than AO3 (Archive of Our Own) being fully down. A single refresh from your own browser can never make that distinction, because it only ever tests from one vantage point on one network.
Yes. HostTracker lets you add any URL - including third-party services you depend on, not just your own website - as a monitored target, and notifies you automatically the moment it becomes unreachable. Before sending an alert, HostTracker re-verifies a failure from multiple locations in its 300+-location network, so you're notified about real, confirmed outages rather than a single location's momentary blip. The free plan checks two monitors every 30 minutes indefinitely at no cost; paid plans check as often as once a minute, with alerts available through SMS, email, voice call, and several messenger apps.
A queue or "try again" page is usually overload rather than a hard outage: the archive is up but shedding requests it cannot serve fast enough, which is a deliberate protection rather than a crash. Search and tag browsing tend to fail first because they are the most expensive operations, so a common pattern is that direct links to a work still load while search does not. Waiting a few minutes genuinely helps in this situation. If nothing loads at all from any location, the reachability check on this page will show it, and that points at something more serious than load.
Because it is a donation-funded non-profit run largely by volunteers, without the elastic commercial infrastructure budget that lets a large platform absorb a sudden ten-fold traffic spike invisibly. Capacity is provisioned for normal use, so fandom-scale surges and scraping waves have a much more visible effect than they would elsewhere. This is a structural characteristic of how the archive is funded and staffed rather than a sign of neglect - and it is why outages there are usually short, load-driven, and resolved without a public incident report.
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