Archive of Our Own ^beta

If you're a regular Archive visitor or if you follow our AO3_Status Twitter account, you may have noticed that we've experienced a number of short downtime incidents over the last few weeks. Here's a brief explanation of what's happening and what we're doing to fix things.

The issue

Every now and then, the volume of traffic we get and the amount of data we're hosting starts to hit the ceiling of what our existing infrastructure can support. We try to plan ahead and start making improvements in advance, but sometimes things simply catch up to us a little too quickly, which is what's happening now.

The good news is that we do have fixes in the works: we've ordered some new servers, and we hope to have them up and running soon. We're making plans to upgrade our database system to a cluster setup that will handle failures better and support more traffic; however, this will take a little longer. And we're working on a number of significant code fixes to improve bottlenecks and reduce server load - we hope to have the first of those out within the next two weeks.

One area that's affected are the number of hits, kudos, comments, and bookmarks on works, so you may see delays in those updating, which will also result in slightly inaccurate search and sort results. Issues with the "Date Updated" sorting on bookmark pages will persist until a larger code rewrite has been deployed.

Behind the scenes

We apologize to everyone who's been affected by these sudden outages, and we'll do our best to minimize the disruption as we work on making things better! We do have an all-volunteer staff, so while we try to respond to server problems quickly, sometimes they happen when we're all either at work or asleep, so we can't always fix things as soon as we'd like to.

While we appreciate how patient and supportive most Archive users are, please keep in mind that tweets and support requests go to real people who may find threats of violence or repeated expletives aimed at them upsetting. Definitely let us know about problems, but try to keep it to language you wouldn't mind seeing in your own inbox, and please understand if we can't predict immediately how long a sudden downtime might take.

The future

Ultimately, we need to keep growing and making things work better because more and more people are using AO3 each year, and that's something to be excited about. December and January tend to bring a lot of activity to the site - holiday gift exchanges are posted or revealed, people are on vacation, and a number of fandoms have new source material.

We're looking forward to seeing all the new fanworks that people create this year, and we'll do our best to keep up with you! And if you're able to donate or volunteer your time, that's a huge help, and we're always thrilled to hear from you.