Avery has been writing fan fiction for about six years, now mainly focused on the gay hockey romance . Until last month, it all lived in one place—Archive of Our Own. Then, on October 29 the fan fiction behemoth went dark due to a “security incident.” Within days, Avery was alarmed to find her works on mirror sites she hadn’t posted them to.

“To me it’s a security risk,” Avery, who did not want her real name used due to fears of backlash on social media, tells WIRED via DM. “One bad actor could put malware in that drive.”

She emailed the sites—Squidgeworld and AO3.Life—and the stories were removed, though she’ll never know if she has found every copy online. (AO3.Life has since been taken down, and Walter Hopgood, president of Squidge.org, which hosts Squidgeworld, told WIRED it removes works that are posted without an author’s permission.)

Avery’s problem is one shared with many fanfic authors since the team behind AO3 announced the site will remain offline for up to four weeks.

Hosting more than 18.8 million fan works across hundreds of thousands of fandoms, AO3 is among the most visited websites in the world. When it went down, some fans started freaking out over the “AO3 apocalypse.” Within days, readers who had saved stories on their own device placed them onto shared libraries on Google Drives. But finding alternatives has caused friction in the community, as some authors are unhappy with the way their works are being distributed without their permission, breaking fanfic norms and exacerbating fears about AI scraping.

One of the many drives to pop up was the Archive Salvation Google Drive project, a collective of fan fiction downloaded from AO3. It faced criticism after launching, though a spokesperson tells WIRED it offered ways for authors to ask for their work to be removed. But it’s since been hacked and is no longer accessible, according to a November 3 statement on a moderator’s TikTok, though the group behind it is still sharing fanfics in a closed Discord server.

“We continue to acknowledge the controversies of such drives but also want to acknowledge the joy this has brought readers and the authors who submitted their fics to us,” the statement said, adding, “our drive was controversial and very public, so the hacker is most likely someone who stands against drives like this in general.”

Avery doesn’t mind her work circulating in private drives or being asked for copies of their work for fans to read—her concern is with her work being uploaded to giant drive libraries.

But she says AO3’s breakdown has revealed entitlement among some readers, who’ve messaged her demanding to know where her fics are now available. “I just can’t wait for AO3 to go back up so that people can go back to normal,” she says. “It’s left a sour taste in my mouth.”

“Writers hating their readers this much will kill fandoms actually,” one user wrote on X in response to an artist expressing frustration about people who “don’t contribute anything to the fandom” weighing in on how work is shared. Another X user accused the same artist of being “self-righteous” and “entitled.”

Avery says some readers seem to feel authors’ feelings “are secondary to the readers.” “It feels like AO3 going down made so many people so crazy that they couldn’t get their fix, and I think the authors are most outspoken because it’s our work.”

Riley, a writer with over 90,000 followers across X and Instagram, ran afoul of some fellow authors when they shared a Google doc cataloging some of the drives compiling fanfic on November 2. Some people claimed it was a privacy violation and could put AO3 users at risk of doxing. “It’s about basic respect,” one user wrote, while others demanded their fics be removed from the list.

Riley, who did not want their real name used for fear of receiving more backlash, made their X account private soon after.

“I did not anticipate the potential harmful effects of me compiling the document of stories, which is why I deleted it,” they tell WIRED.

Meanwhile, Ellipsus, a collaborative writing platform with an anti-AI stance that was founded in 2022, has seen a boom in interest since AO3 went down. Allegra Rosenberg, an Ellipsus employee and writer, says that new sign-ups are up more than 500 percent since the outage began and views of its public reader links—the ways in which authors can share work—have increased heavily.

What Ellipsus offers is control. Authors can control who can see their work and how they can interact with it. They can turn on comments, and readers can leave kudos (called “props” on Ellipsus), as well as custom fonts and themes. Rosenberg says the company noticed that many of the users were fan fiction writers and adjusted features for them before the outage, for example, a button that exports work directly to AO3.

”We know that people want a space to not only write but share new writing, in a way that feels safe for them,” says Rosenberg.

Another reason the outage has felt so fraught is that the world of fan fiction has broken containment, becoming mainstream in part due to shows like and the adaptation of former fan fictions such as by SenLinYu, which was originally published on AO3, into bona fide novels.

“It’s the Tik-tokification of fanfic,” Avery says.“Everyone wants a snippet and a graphic and a one shot, and they can share it on Twitter, and then suddenly a thing I wrote years ago goes viral. Fan fiction never used to go viral.”

Rosenberg, who is writing a book on fandom, thinks that so much of the backlash comes from a mismatch between how big the community actually is and how small it still feels to many. The giant drives and libraries drew outrage due to their scale and a fear from many fans that their stories could be taken down. That fear has a real history within fandom spaces.

“In the ’90s and 2000s, there were cease-and-desist notices and takedown controversies on Fanfiction.net and LiveJournal that led to AO3’s founding,” Rosenberg explains. “So there is this shared history and memory within fandom culture as a whole when it comes to fan fiction.”

The demand for fan fiction does not come only from people active in fandom circles. It also comes from people who are seen as casual fans—those who are not as invested in the wider fandom. Fan fiction operates on norms where people ask permission, and there is a tolerance for a certain level of informal sharing. The AO3 outage has tested these norms and has exposed the lack of practical protection an author has once their work is posted. Readers are doing what they have always done—sharing work that they love. However, the burden of this sharing is uneven, as authors fear losing track of their own work.

“I think this whole AO3 going down thing has reminded people that the internet is forever for better or for worse,” Avery says. “Long after I die, if we still have the internet, my fics will float about even without AO3.”