Archive of Our Own (AO3), a massive repository for fanfiction and creative writing, might be down for as long as a month after going down for "maintenance" on Thursday.

The Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), the non-profit organization that runs AO3, posted on its status page early Thursday morning that the site was down for maintenance. A few hours later, it updated the status to say that it was expected to take at least 12 hours. By Thursday afternoon, it said the site restoration will take around two weeks, but could take up to a month.

“We are hopeful that we will be able to bring the site back up in a degraded state sooner. If that does happen, there may be times when the site has to be brought down temporarily until this is fully resolved. Please stay tuned for further info,” OTW wrote.

A spokesperson for OTW told 404 Media Thursday night that there are no more updates at this time beyond what's on the status page. They did, however, say that they don't expect there to be data loss. Early Friday morning, OTW added an update to the status page: "First, no AO3 data has been deleted. All your works, bookmarks, kudos, etc., are safe," it says. "Second, while we currently don't believe that the user database was stolen, we are also unable to rule it out. The AO3 database contains account information that may include your username, email address, IP address, and a hashed version of your password." They say they use hashing techniques to protect password data, but recommend users change their passwords on any other sites where they use the same password as on AO3, as a precaution.

It’s difficult to overstate the importance of AO3 to fan culture, fanfiction writers and readers, and its influence on internet culture in general. As of September, the open-source fanfic repository hosted over 18.4 million works spanning over 82,900 fandoms. This status update means AO3 is expected to be down during much of hoa hoa hoa season, most of ACOTAR new book release week, and on the cusp of the month formerly known as NaNoWriMo. If you were going as Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way for Halloween, you are in our thoughts. And if you have something to share about AO3’s extended shutdown and how it will affect the fanfic community, I'd love to hear from you: sam@404media.co.

Updated to add OTW comment and Friday morning's status page update.

We start this week with Jason and Joseph’s article about leaked audio from a private police conference. In that audio, Flock’s CEO made all sorts of wild claims about the backlash to his company not being real, and his wife’s advice to never apologize. After the break, Sam tells us why former Yahoo CEO Marrisa Mayer can’t keep pretending ‘gender doesn’t matter.’ In the subscribers-only section, Joseph tells us about a woman who is facing years in prison because someone else opened a CashApp account in her name.

Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.

• ⁠In Leaked Audio, Flock CEO Tells Cops Backlash to the Company Isn’t Real⁠
• ⁠Marissa Mayer Can’t Keep Pretending 'Gender Doesn't Matter'⁠
• ⁠Someone Opened a CashApp In Her Name. She Faces Years in Prison⁠

Andy Yen, the CEO of Proton, had a message for an employee in the company’s security Slack channel who urged the company to at least take a few days to pentest newly written code before pushing it live. “That’s bullshit and loser thinking. Of course it’s possible to be fast and secure,” Yen wrote in the channel at the end of August. “Stop thinking always of how to be slower, and focus more on how to be faster.”

In a follow-up message, Yen reiterated his point: “only losers think like that.” His ultimate message for the team was to “stop lovingly handcrafting all our code and use AI more.”

That exchange was just one of many that showed how Yen and other company executives are aggressively pushing Proton towards AI. Proton is a Swiss company that famously makes the encrypted email service Proton Mail and a suite of privacy and security-focused products, including an encrypted drive service, an authenticator app, a password manager, and more.

In the last few months, Yen set up an email address for employees to contact if they come across anything blocking adoption of AI at Proton, so leadership can “ruthlessly smash everything that stands in the way of AI velocity;” Proton installed software on workers’ computers that track how much AI code the company is generating; and Yen said this is the last year that Proton will hire engineers at all, and instead only hire people to build things with AI.

That AI push came to head this week when 404 Media reported Proton said it would re-interview staff about their use of AI, with the clear implication that those interviews, and employees’ willingness to embrace AI, could decide whether a worker is fired or not.

404 Media spoke to eight current and one former Proton employees and reviewed Slack chats, meeting recordings, and an AI manifesto written by the company’s CTO. Our reporting reveals a culture of fear inside Proton, where many employees are hesitant to even mildly critique Yen’s views or discuss engineering problems. Workers describe an environment where employees have genuine concerns about security or being asked to develop security products with AI, but feel unable to voice them, lest Yen berates them in front of everyone or threatens their employment at the company.

“The CEO is in full AI psychosis and has been for a while now,” one of the sources told 404 Media.

Our reporting also paints a picture of Proton that is likely very different to the public’s perception of a company with a goal of carefully protecting privacy: one that in reality is barreling ahead with AI as quickly as possible so it can achieve the explicit goal of more annual revenue.

“Due to insufficient velocity,” Proton is not on track to achieve its annual recurring revenue target by the end of the year, one internal document obtained by 404 Media reads. Proton’s year-over-year growth is also “far away from what the market today considers to be good,” and, “By all metrics that matter, we’re an underperforming company.”

In response to detailed questions from 404 Media, a Proton spokesperson did not dispute any of our reporting or characterization of what’s happening inside of the company. 

“It’s clear that some people at Proton are unhappy with our direction, or misunderstand it, and many people are anxious,” they said. “In our determination to move fast, we have sometimes been too blunt or too slow in explaining ourselves to our people. We will work on that, as their questions are the ones we most need to answer.”

Yen, a former CERN particle physicist, projects a measured approach in public, but internally he acts more like what one employee described as a “petulant child.” In May, Proton announced it was implementing post-quantum cryptography which should protect against future attacks from quantum computers. The work took years of effort, with one caveat that it would not work on older emails, only those written after the feature’s launch, at least for the moment. Yen was not happy that Proton was drawing attention to this limitation.

Oregon Senator Ron Wyden and Massachusetts Senator Edward Markey sent a letter to Meta on Wednesday demanding the company answer for the privacy concerns its smart glasses pose to the public. 

The letter cites 404 Media’s October 2025 investigation into how people use Meta’s smart glasses to harass massage parlor workers. That investigation found Instagram accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers and millions of views uploaded videos filmed with Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses, where men entered massage parlors across the country and solicited the workers for sex work. The full letter is here. 

“Meta’s own disclosures confirm that imagery processed through its glasses’ visual AI features may be retained and used to train AI systems, including with the assistance of human reviewers,” the letter says. “Using intimate imagery for AI development is itself an invasion of privacy when the people depicted have not consented to that use, as is inherently the case for most bystanders captured by Meta’s glasses. Retaining that material for AI development, thereby extending the period during which it can be accessed, disclosed, or misused, exploits people’s highly sensitive information for Meta’s commercial benefit.”

Research published in August revealed how Meta’s platforms encourage an ecosystem of abusive, harassing content from pickup artists and influencers who use Meta’s smart glasses to capture interactions with people minding their own business in public or at their workplaces, who might not even know they’re being filmed. In a January report by the BBC, a woman who was recorded with the glasses said she was “bombarded” with phone calls because her phone number was posted with the video, and men who had seen the video stalked her at work.

Earlier this year, more than 70 people sued Meta, claiming that their intimate images and videos were exposed to workers hired by the company to label the data for AI. In March, Swedish journalists reported that Kenyan data labelers were viewing and annotating uncensored footage from Meta’s smart glasses, including sexual and violent content; Meta ended its contract with those workers less than two months later. These are labor conditions that groups like the Data Labelers Association in Kenya are fighting back against, and for the people whose images are in the videos and photos, it’s an obvious violation of their privacy. People have also been modding these glasses to disable the light that indicates they’re recording for years 

Meta has played dumb about the difference between AI glasses you wear on your face and an iPhone for a long time. Now, these senators want the tech giant to answer for themselves. In the letter, Wyden and Markey demand answers about what safeguards, if any, Meta has in place to prevent the nonconsensual “capture, disclosure, or processing of sensitive and intimate imagery,” whether Meta specifically evaluated the potential for its glasses “to facilitate voyeurism, nonconsensual intimate image capture, or similar privacy invasions,” what imagery it uses for AI training, and whether people can request their biometric and other data captured by its glasses be deleted, along with several more questions about the glasses’ safety and design.

“The reported disclosure of intimate footage to contractors for the purpose of AI training is particularly disturbing. Human review to fulfill a service knowingly requested by the person depicted is one thing; exposing unsuspecting individuals’ intimate moments to strangers for AI training is quite another,” Wyden and Markey wrote. “The individuals whose naked bodies, sexual activity, and other private moments have reportedly been captured by Meta glasses did not knowingly agree to having those images shared with strangers, much less for the purpose of improving Meta’s commercial AI systems. That disclosure and processing is an invasion of privacy, regardless of whether the footage is subsequently published or misused.” 

In the last few weeks, Meta has come under fire for quietly changing its privacy policies for business accounts and granting itself permission to scrape user’s content and connected websites to develop its AI products. 

Meta has been pushing its smart glasses over the years with ads featuring A-list celebrities, including Chris Pratt, Chris Hemsworth, and Kris Jenner (all three in a 2025 Superbowl ad), Doja Cat, Jennie Kim from K-pop group BLACKPINK, and most recently, Kylie Jenner. Guerrilla ad makers have countered with their own anti-AI glasses ads around the world, and people have started calling the smart glasses "pervert glasses" in response to these widespread invasions of privacy they've come to represent. In August, Meta filed a patent to add facial recognition and highlight reel features to its smart glasses.