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‘The war is over’ AO3 is back! Twitter thanks volunteers for their dedication
After two days of battling a DDoS attack by the hacktivist group, Anonymous Sudan, AO3 volunteers have successfully revived Archive of Our Own.
Fans rejoice all across the world—AO3 is back! After the agonizing past couple of days, AO3 volunteers have successfully overcome the DDoS attack the website was under.
A‘Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack’ is a cyber crime executed by overloading a server with superfluous requests, rendering it useless.
For the past two days, a“collective of religiously and politically motivated hackers” called Anonymous Sudan had launched a DDoS attack on AO3. The group claimed that it attacked AO3 because it is, “against all forms of degeneracy, and the site is full of disgusting smuts and other LGBTQ+ and NSFW things.”
While the group originally stated that the attack would last 24 hours, they later threatened to attack the website for “weeks” unless they paid $30,000 in Bitcoin.
Archive of Our Own (AO3) is a nonprofit website by the Organisation of Transformative Works. It is currently the most popular platform for fan-created content. The fansite boasts a vast collection of fanfiction and other fanworks. It is widely praised for its user-friendly interface which allows fans to filter content based on their preferences.
Content creators across fandoms find AO3 to be a safe space since it follows a “maximum inclusiveness” and minimal content censorship policy.
As a nonprofit initiative, AO3 is solely dependent on the contributions of its users and is run by volunteers. Due to the DDoS attack, AO3 volunteers had been working tirelessly to get the website back up and running. Thanks to their efforts, fans are once again able to enjoy the repository of content on the website.
AO3 users have taken to Twitter to express their gratitude for the volunteers. They also encourage anyone who can, to donate as much as possible in support of the volunteers.
