Vibe Coded AO3 Clone Site Down After Fanfic Authors Buried It With 2,000 Takedown Notices in a Single Day
“Of course, authors couldn’t access AO3 while it was down to lock their works if they were publicly available before the outage.”
What happened
While the fan-fiction archive AO3 was offline, a copycat site built with AI tools scraped its stories and sold AI-narrated audiobooks of them. It went down after authors sent more than 2,000 takedown requests on its first day, and its removal process asked authors to prove ownership by posting a note on their AO3 profiles, which were offline.