By 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) is currently experiencing a wave of distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that have forced the website offline since Monday. 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.”
A group claiming to be Anonymous Sudan has taken credit for the attack, and is demanding a ransom to stop the ongoing operation.
The AO3 team is currently trying to defend against the attack and restore the platform, warning that users may experience various error messages…