The massive fanfic archive AO3 is back after a wave of DDoS attacks
by Jess Weatherbed from The Verge - All Posts on (#6CW6C)
The group taking credit for the attack is threatening to keep the site down for weeks. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
The popular fanfiction platform Archive of Our Own (AO3) has been restored after a wave of distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks forced the website offline for over a day. AO3 first acknowledged the outage on the company's official Twitter account on July 10th at 8.24AM ET, later confirming that the issue was caused by a DDoS attack" - a malicious cybercrime in which threat actors overwhelm a server with traffic - causing the servers to fall over."
In an update on Tuesday afternoon, AO3 tweeted, We're back!" but noted that it may need to do some work to optimize our shiny new Cloudflare setup." When we tried going on the site ourselves, it took a little while to load, but we were able to access it.
A group claiming to be...