Is Archive of Our Own Down?
Reachable from all 8 checked regions
Average response time: 29ms
Last checked · checks run every 6 hours
Official status page: https://www.otwstatus.org
Archive of Our Own uptime
Measured from multiple regions every 6 hours. Percentages count only checks that returned an availability answer — 5 days measured so far. A dash means that window does not yet hold enough measured days to publish a figure.
30-day history
5-day clean streakReachability by region
Each region runs its own request from a different part of the world. A service can be up for one continent and down for another, which is usually the first sign of a routing or CDN problem.
What Archive of Our Own does
Archive of Our Own, usually shortened to AO3, is a non-commercial fan fiction archive run by the Organization for Transformative Works, a volunteer non-profit. It hosts millions of works with a detailed tagging and filtering system, and takes no advertising, funding itself through donation drives instead. Readers and writers treat it as the default home for fan writing.
What an outage looks like
AO3 outages usually show as Error 502 or 503 pages rather than a clean message, or as pages that load slowly and then time out. A separate and more common problem is a Retry Later message, which is a per-IP rate limit rather than an outage. Forced logouts reading session expired or auth error are a known ongoing issue AO3 documents itself.
What to do about it
The Organization for Transformative Works publishes a status page at otwstatus.org covering Archive of Our Own alongside Fanlore and its other projects. AO3 also posts updates on Bluesky at status.archiveofourown.org, on Tumblr as ao3org and on Twitter as AO3_Status. If you are seeing Retry Later, AO3's own advice is to slow down: the block is temporary per IP and clears after a few minutes.
Is it down for everyone, or just you?
If this page says Archive of Our Own is up but it is not loading for you, the problem is between you and them. Run a check against any URL from all 18 regions to find out where it breaks.
Related services
Archive of Our Own outage FAQ
Is AO3 down or am I being rate limited?
Why do I keep getting logged out of AO3?
Will I lose a work I was posting when AO3 goes down?
Does an AO3 outage stop subscription emails?
How we measure this
- We request Archive of Our Own's public endpoint every 6 hours from Fly.io regions across six continents — 8 of them answered the most recent check.
- A region counts as down only when it gets no usable HTTP response. A
403or429means the origin answered and refused us, which we report as blocked, never as an outage. - A single failing region is treated as probe noise. We only change the verdict when two consecutive cycles agree.
- Response times average only the regions that actually served the page, so a timeout never inflates the number.
- Where Archive of Our Own publishes an official status feed we read it too. An all-clear from the vendor can soften an unconfirmed degradation; a vendor-declared outage only worsens our verdict when our own checks corroborate it.
Get alerted when Archive of Our Own goes down
This page refreshes every 6 hours. Your own monitors run as often as every 30 seconds, from the same 18 regions, and tell you the moment something breaks.
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