AO3 was taken offline on October 29, 2026, initially for what was described as maintenance. The Organization for Transformative Works later said it had found evidence of a security incident and would keep the site down while investigating and responding. The incident remained unresolved in the latest update, posted October 30. The organization estimated that restoring service would take about two weeks, possibly as long as four; a limited or read-only version might return sooner, but could be taken offline again during recovery.
The organization said no works, bookmarks, kudos, or other AO3 data had been deleted. It had not found evidence that the user database was stolen, but could not rule that out. That database may contain usernames, email addresses, IP addresses, and hashed passwords; because weak or reused passwords may still be vulnerable, users were advised to change matching passwords on other sites. AO3 does not collect real names, and donor records are kept separately, so neither was considered exposed. The investigation’s scope was still unclear, and further updates were promised through official channels. The status page also showed Fanlore, Transformative Works and Cultures, and the OTW website as operational.
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CVE-2026-98432 is a critical Linux IPv4 TCP handshake use-after-free, remotely exploitable without authentication and potentially allowing root command execution on servers with multipath TCP listeners. Upstream fixes are available, but Ubuntu and RHEL had not yet shipped patched kernels as of October 29, 2026. (atlasum.net)
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