Leadership & Strategy
The volunteer-run nonprofit behind AO3 says the archive could be offline for up to four weeks
A security incident has kept the fan fiction archive down since October 29. The group that runs it lives on donations, about 900 volunteers and roughly $1 million a year.
By The Editors · The Game of Giving
The Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), the volunteer-run nonprofit that operates the fan fiction site Archive of Our Own (AO3), says the archive could stay offline for up to four weeks after a security incident it disclosed late on October 29.
AO3 went down for what the group first called maintenance at 07:13 UTC on October 29, or 3:13 a.m. Eastern, according to the OTW's status page. Some coverage dated the shutdown to October 30; the status log shows it began a day earlier. The archive hosts more than 18 million fan works and had more than 11 million registered users as of this summer, Gizmodo reported.
What did the OTW say about users and donors?
It said no content was lost, but it cannot rule out that the user database was taken. "All your works, bookmarks, kudos, etc., are safe," the group wrote in an October 30 update. The database may hold usernames, email addresses, IP addresses and hashed passwords, so the OTW advised users to change any password they also used on other sites. AO3 does not collect real names.
The OTW also said donor information is held in a separate system that is never linked to AO3, so it was not exposed. It estimates restoration will take about two weeks and could take four, and the site may first return in a degraded or read-only state.
How big is the organization behind AO3?
Small for what it runs. The OTW is a fan-run nonprofit founded in 2007 and, by its own description, sustained entirely by donations from users. The table is our summary of its 2024 annual report, the most recent full year it has published.
| 2024, per the OTW annual report | Amount |
|---|---|
| Total revenue | $1,343,448 |
| Direct contributions | $814,823 |
| Donated goods and services (in-kind) | $466,267 |
| Total expenses | $1,031,537 |
| Server hosting charged to AO3 | $103,521 |
| Net assets at year end | $3,762,445 |
| Volunteers at year end | 889 |
By our arithmetic, AO3's server hosting was about 10% of the group's 2024 spending, and its net assets equaled about three and a half years of that spending. Its two donation drives, in April and October, raised $421,788 between them, a little over half of direct contributions. Operating cash fell to $1.32 million at the end of 2024 from $2.03 million a year earlier, the report shows.
Why does the tax return show less revenue?
Because of the in-kind line, it appears. The OTW's Form 990, the annual return most tax-exempt groups file with the IRS, reports $877,181 in 2024 revenue and no salaries, according to ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer. That is the annual report's total minus its $466,267 of in-kind revenue, almost to the dollar. Our reading is that donated services are counted in the annual report but not as revenue on the return. We have not seen the OTW's audited statements.
What can other small nonprofits take from it?
In our view, three things. First, keeping donor records in a system separate from the service people use limited the damage here, as it would at any charity that runs a public website. Second, reserves matter when the platform is the program: the OTW can absorb weeks of recovery without a revenue event. Third, a volunteer engineering team cannot be on call the way paid staff are, a point Engadget raised about this outage, and boards should plan for that, as the nonprofits caught out when Microsoft deleted their data too early learned. Open projects also carry costs from outside traffic, as the Wikimedia Foundation said this fall.
General information for donors and nonprofit leaders, not legal or tax advice. How we report is set out in our editorial guide.
