2023 OTW DDOS Attack

Event
Event:	DDOS attack on OTW
Participants:
Date(s):	July 10, 2023
Type:	wank, site outage that affected fandom
Fandom:	fandom-wide
URL:
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A DDOS attack brought down most websites operated by the Organization for Transformative Works, including AO3 and Fanlore. The outtage lasted for 30 hours, until OTW sysadmins set up DDOS protection through Cloudflare.

Impact

• The AO3 website was mostly inaccessible. It was unresponsive or returned a generic error page instead of the content of any page it hosted.
• The OTW website was down, too. OTW's donation form was under the same attack and made unavailable, although the form used a third party service.
• Fanlore was down, too.

Timeline

• It started in July: OTW Website and Donation Form Are Down, ^{Archived version} -- "As of now, 18:50 UTC on July 11, 2023, AO3 is back up. However, in the past hours the OTW website and the donation platform have become inaccessible."
  • July 10: AO3 acknowledged the attack.
  • July 11: AO3 declared it was back up.
  • July 17: AO3 restored its support forms.
  • July 21: The donation form was restored.
• Their official Tumblr had relevant posts on July 10, July 11, July 12 and July 17.
• Twitter had more updates on the timeline

Behind the Scenes

On 25 March 2024, the OTW Systems Committee published an after-action report of the DDOS attacks. This report contained a behind-the-scenes look at what Systems did to fight the attack between 11:48 UTC on July 10th, when the attack on AO3 began, and 28 hours later at 15:42 UTC on July 11th, when the Archive became fully accessible again. It also detailed a number of notable follow-up attacks in the following 2 months.

Introduction

This work provides an overview of the July & August of 2023 DDoS attacks against the Archive of Our Own from the perspective of the OTW’s Systems Committee. As such, it may include some technical terms and information. We’ll do our best to explain or link to external resources to help provide some context as needed. We will focus on the series of events for which we have data & evidence, rather than speculation. All times & dates are in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) and in 24 hour format unless otherwise stated.

As a reminder, the Systems Committee consists of 8 volunteers (6 at the time of the incident) who donate their free time to maintaining the OTW infrastructure. The events outlined below were fit in during our day jobs, evenings and night times.

Thank you

Some fans wanted to thank the OTW volunteers worked to respond to the attack. OTW volunteer James suggested people donate to their local food banks, and some fans started a charity drive, creating a google form for people to anonymously report their donations and leave messages of thanks.

Also this post: https://www.tumblr.com/thevoidisscreamingbackatyou/722511990987407360/yknow-what-ao3-appreciation-post-cause-these?source=share

Fanworks

• HELP WHILE Ao3 IS DOWN SOME PEOPLE ARE POSTING FICS IN THE DOWNDETECTOR COMMENTS 😭😭😭, ^{Archived version} -- anthropomorfic about the event
• DDoS AKA Deceased Deductions of Sabotage, ^{Archived version} -- another fanfic about the event
• girlies when AO3 IS DOWN!!!!!!! -- meme response to AO3 being down (see also collection of memes from twitter -- TO FIND)
• When AO3 server is down, ^{Archived version} -- reddit post by sakurazawa13; was reposted to Tumblr where it accrued over 40k notes
• Destiel News Meme: 1) when AO3 went down link 1, when it returned link1, a different version
• I SURVIVED The DDoS Attack on AO3 -- meme celebrating the end of the attack and AO3's return to service
• It’s my dream to make T-shirts one day. by horatio-fig -- another meme about the end of the attack

Links

• Re: Archive of Our Own / AO3 / OTW - AO3 Down? (2023-07-10) -- FFA thread begun when users first noticed AO3 was down
• Update Megathread for Tuesday July 11th -- r/AO3 thread for sharing news for for July 11th