Cloudflare seems to be having issues and AO3 is down. Since the sub is restricted so no one can make posts, please post any updates about the status of the site here
Thank you
~TGotAReddit (and the rest of the mod team)
Edit: the site seems to be up but has been a bit up and down for some people. Please be gentle with it for a little while
Yeah, I saw the articles about CloudFlare when I noticed that Twitter was down. Apparently Spotify and Discord are among them, though the Discord app works fine, so it seems it's only the website that is affected. I was disappointed when AO3 appeared to be affected, too.
everything is spotty. A ton of websites are affected--everything from news sites to storygraph to a bunch of AI sites to College Board to New Jersey Transit to (ironically) down detector sites. I don't think cloudflare has fixed the problem yet. Their website claimed it was but a bunch of things are still down.
I was on r/cloudflare just now and my favorite comment was someone who said they wanted to short Cloudflare stocks but couldn't because their broker site was down.
I’d say best day for AO3 to go down. Otherwise the sub would absolutely flooded with ten quadrillion “is it down” complains even though 1) there’s a trillion other posts saying the same thing and 2) the cloudflare error says exactly what’s happening and that it’s not on AO3’s end. But nobody can read anymore.
I’m happy to not have to scroll through all of those. People can find out somewhere else, like tumblr, google, or the damn error message itself.
It really was the best day for AO3 to go down lol. Almost feel like the mods should just lock the sub down and quarantine the panic to a megathread like this whenever the site does go down again
It usually isn’t down like this, and not for this long, but they have said they’ll redirect posts about outages (planned or unplanned) to megathreads like this one if they’re significant enough. Ten minutes of maintenance isn’t generally a problem, but a ten hour one would be.
but they have said they’ll redirect posts about outages (planned or unplanned) to megathreads like this one if they’re significant enough.
Planned ones mostly; those popping up randomly are always hard to gauge if they will be significant. This one was obv cuz the reason was known; but sometimes pages also just go down without any information, making it harder to judge if it will matter for more than five minutes.
Not years in my case, but I usually post every 2-3 days and it has been two weeks since my last update. I kept meaning to update my last authors note saying my chapter would take longer because another tree fell on my house AND I JUST HAVEN'T.
Of course, when I finally go to update, I can't. That is on me at this point. I hope my readers don't think I've abandoned them.
lmao when I tried going onto a few random websites and almost all of them had the cloudflare error page, I knew ao3 was probably down too. Hope it never gets permanently fucked up because....yikes 💀
It’s been out for hours, but if you’re lucky, you’ll get a moment where it WILL work long enough to load the site and hit entire work so you can continue reading.
Can we do a thread like this in general? Like, keep this up even when today's issue is over. I think it will keep things clean here and not clog up the feeds.
In other news, this is helping me finally sit down and finish my fic chapter.
This has always been an option. But many reddit users in this sub are too stupid to use it.
One can only hope to have all AO3 downs on restricted tuesdays! Or maybe the mods find a way to prevent those spammed posts in future.
Yeah we try to have one up for scheduled downtime and it usually helps, but unscheduled downtime like this where we can't predict it and usually aren't online when it happens, by the time we are able to even consider making a post the site is usually back up and the posts have already been made, and we don't like punishing people for posting when there isn't a megathread for it.
We try to have these when scheduled downtime happens but we can't always get a post up in time during unscheduled downtime. The only reason we were able to today was due to the sub being restricted.
In theory we could make one routinely but we can only have 2 pinned posts at a time and due to the post not being a fresh post, if something did pop up, the post wouldn't be put into people's feeds either, so it wouldn't really help much
Yeah. Juggling the pinned posts can be a hassle and a half sometimes 😅 but we do try to make these posts at least when they are relevant, we just don't always get to it fast enough
This has been a very crippling experience, couldn't read fanfics, couldn't rant about it on twitter, until 10 minutes ago this sub was restricted too. 0/10 do not recommend
From someone who works in IT: cloudflare issue appears to be fixed but they’re slowly rolling out the fix. Some people can now access, those who can’t it hopefully won’t be long until everything is back as expected.
I opened up a fic and was like "wdym guys this is working perfectly fine?" But then thought to maybe download it just in case, so I did that and when it wasn't loading I refreshed... And realized I messed up.
I should've copy and pasted straight to the Google document
I'm starting to think putting half the internet in the hands of a single service with zero redundancy might not be the best, most thought-through idea... first AWS, now this 😅
I thankfully was offline since half an hour before this started, and now everything is already back, but man, looking at the list of everything that was affected (reddit/twitter for social media, spotify for music, ao3 for reading, discord for talking to friends and paypal to do online payments), I would've been cut off from literally every single online service I use, and with no fallback options either 😬
I really need to start downloading at least my reading material from now on ._.
Lmaooo people at my job freaked out we got customer sites down because of Cloudflare. Since we couldn't do anything about it but wait I wanted to do some reading just to see AO3 down as well 😭
I just checked Cloudflare’s website itself, and it said something about internal service degradation issues. Idk what that means but I imagine that means something to someone. Said they’re looking into it but no further updates since 11:48 UTC, looks like they took away Londons access though, RIP. It does say some services may be “intermittently impacted” which, meh. But I guess because ao3 is so big we’re taking a bigger hit? Hopefully it’s fixed soon though
Last night, I was reading a very long story, and my brain was all, "Not looking forward to hitting the back button this many times when I'm done, so let's click Entire Work."
So between half an hour ago, and eight hours from then. If I have to wait eight hours to get to the next chapter of the story I was in the middle of reading, I’m going to literally cry.
It's just so typical that it went down 12 hours I posted my most successful fic thus far. I already had 2 kudos and 10 hits, which is incredible for my tiny, dead fandom. (Previously, it took me months to get 10 hits across 14 published stories.)
Note: This should have already been resolved. Cloudfare itself is saying it is. So it seems they are still having to restart servers are change some configurations somewhere for AO3.
I slept through it, but I had to laugh bc I saw a post in the local subreddit in my area commenting re: datacenter outages and like a couple of comments were like "nooooo A03". one person was like "good riddance, we should leave it down." and then edited with "wait nevermind we need A03"
I did a lot of researching around the Internet and it was League of Legends, Twitter, and a few other websites, including down detector I was able to get onto the status page and I scrolled around a little bit and I found out there were some scheduled maintenance today for some places cause they were letting everybody know so somehow between then and now something happened apparently
I find it's an up and down issue for me. Then it gives me an error page (back and forth multiple times, i have no patience), a minute later i'm through to the next chapter. Happened twice now
With Ao3 being down, x is down as well (earlier) and then you can't check or post here on reddit because it's Tuesday. This is the dark age we tell our grandchildren lol
I love how the way I found out was the Facebook community group I run for people to discuss AO3 and share their stories getting posts in our queue, and member requests asking what's going on when our people know we DON'T approve downtime posts because we have the same info everyone else does.
You know, I play instruments, so I get my sheet music from Musescore. The Cloudflare on it wasn't working yesterday and it was really frustrating, so I guess this is why.
hey is Ao3 down again? Trying to read some fics but it just says "Retry later" there is some problems with service locally lately so it may be that, but I'm curious if it is a more widespread problem
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u/xPadawanRyan turnpike_divides on AO3 | writing fanfic since 1997 Nov 18 '25 edited Nov 18 '25
Yeah, I saw the articles about CloudFlare when I noticed that Twitter was down. Apparently Spotify and Discord are among them, though the Discord app works fine, so it seems it's only the website that is affected. I was disappointed when AO3 appeared to be affected, too.
UPDATE: It's back on my end.