The Archive of Our Own will be undergoing some maintenance today at approximately 18.00 UTC (what time is this in my timezone?). During the maintenance period, which will last approximately two hours, downloads will not work. You will still be able to browse and read on the Archive, but will not be able to download any works. If the work proves complicated, we may also have a period of downtime (although we hope to avoid this).
What’s going on?
In the next few weeks, we’ll be adding some new servers to the OTW server family. The new servers will add some extra capacity to the Archive of Our Own, and will also create extra room for Fanlore, which is growing rapidly thanks to the amazing work of thousands of fannish editors (as Fanlore users are well aware, this expansion has been putting the existing Fanlore server under increasing strain).
In preparation for these new servers, we need to first reorganise the setup of the existing servers in order to free some more physical space at our colocation host without buying more rack space (rack space costs money, so it’s nice not to use more than we need). In order to do this, we’ll have to take some of the servers offline for a little while today. Doing this now will minimize the disruption caused when the servers arrive during the holiday period, which is typically one of the busiest times of year for the Archive.
The Archive is set up so it can function without all servers running at once, so today, we will only have to take the server which hosts downloads offline. This means that attempts to download any work will fail while we reorganize our data, though the rest of the site will work as usual (pending any unexpected problems). If you prefer to read downloaded works, you may wish to stock up now! Downloads will be restored as soon as we finish our maintenance. We’ll keep you posted about further maintenance when the new servers arrive!
Thanks for your patience while we do this work. You can keep track of current site status via our Twitter account AO3_Status.