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 to the fanfic works best. Searching by title takes one extra step.

No link? Here’s where to find it

An Archive Learning update is coming in the next few days: you’ll be able to read saved copies in the app and keep learning languages with fanfiction while AO3 is down.

How does it work?

We show you several places where a saved copy of the fanfic may be. AO3 itself is down for maintenance, and the team expects it to be back within a few weeks. You can follow the status at otwstatus.org.

Wayback Machine

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. It 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.

FicHub

FicHub is a free, open-source site. It turns fanfics into EPUB, PDF and HTML files and may keep the ones it has made. If someone once downloaded the fanfic you need through FicHub, you can download the copy now too: it doesn’t need AO3. It can take up to a minute to answer, since lots of readers are using it right now.

archive.today

A second internet archive, separate from the Wayback Machine. It has fewer fanfics, but sometimes keeps chapters the Wayback Machine doesn’t have. It may ask you to prove you’re not a robot. If archive.today knows the fanfic, we’ll show its title, author and fandom above the results.

Other sites

Many authors post their stories on FanFiction.net, Wattpad and other sites too. There the fanfic may be complete, even with new chapters.

Archive Learning

That’s 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.

If you know another place where fanfics might be saved and we haven’t mentioned it, write to us on Twitter or by email.

Where can I find the link?

The easiest place to look is the browser history on the device where you read AO3. If it hasn’t been cleared, it has links to everything you’ve opened.

  • Chrome on Android: tap the three dots at the top right and choose History.
  • Chrome on iPhone: tap the three dots at the bottom right and choose History.
  • Safari on iPhone: tap the book icon at the bottom and open the clock tab.

In the history, type archiveofourown into the search box to see only AO3 pages, or start typing the fanfic’s title. Press and hold the one you need and choose Copy link.

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.