How to find an AO3 fanfic while the site is down
While AO3 is down for maintenance, many fanfics are still saved in several internet archives and on other sites. This page shows you the main places to look. Paste a link or enter a title.
A link from your browser history or bookmarks works best. Searching by title takes one extra step.
Archive Learning is an app for learning languages through fanfiction. In the next few days we’ll release an update that lets you read fanfics from saved copies while AO3 is down.
How does it work?
We’ll show you several places where a saved copy of the fanfic may be.
The Wayback Machine only has what it saved before 29 October 2026, when AO3 was taken offline for maintenance. New chapters and recently posted fanfics may be missing.
Popular fanfics and fanfics that have been on AO3 for a long time are more likely to have been saved. Newer and less popular ones may not have been saved at all.
Locked fanfics, which authors have made available only to logged-in AO3 users, aren’t available in the Wayback Machine.
Often, only the first chapter was saved. To find the other chapters, open “All saved copies” and look for URLs containing /chapters/. This doesn’t work for every fanfic.
If the copy stops at the adult-content warning, open “All saved copies” and choose a URL ending in view_adult=true.
The Wayback Machine can go down too. So many AO3 readers have turned to it at once that it can be slow, fail to load, or show a “Too many requests” error. That doesn’t mean the fanfic isn’t there: wait a few minutes and try again.
Where can I find the link?
The easiest place to look is the browser history on the device where you read AO3: it has links to everything you’ve opened. Bookmarks work too, as do tabs you never closed, links friends sent you, and recommendation posts on Tumblr or Twitter.
If you read in the Archive Learning app, open your library, press and hold a fanfic, and tap “Copy link”. Fanfics you’ve opened but never added to your library are in Reading history (the clock icon in the library). Tap a fanfic there: you’ll see AO3’s maintenance page instead of the text, but the link is still the right one. Tap the three dots in the top right corner and choose “Copy link”.
Privacy
This page does its work in your browser and doesn’t store what you type.
Who’s who?
AO3 (Archive of Our Own) is the site where the fanfics actually live. It’s currently down for maintenance, and the team expects it to be back within a few weeks. You can follow the status at otwstatus.org.
The Wayback Machine is a project of the Internet Archive (archive.org), a nonprofit digital library. For years, it has been visiting websites and saving copies of their pages, including pages from AO3. Those are the copies you can open from here.
archive.today is another internet archive, separate from the Wayback Machine. It has fewer fanfics, but sometimes keeps chapters the Wayback Machine missed.
FicHub is a site readers use to download fanfics as files, and it may keep those copies. If someone once downloaded a fanfic through it, a copy may still be there.
Archive Learning is us, an app for learning languages through fanfiction. We don’t store any fanfics on our servers, and we’re not affiliated with AO3 or the Internet Archive. This page just helps you find a saved copy of the fanfic.