In the wake of fanfiction repository Archive of Our Own (AO3) announcing a weeks-long security incident outage, readers and writers are reflecting on why the site is important to the fanfiction community, and how they’re coping with the downtime.  

On Thursday, the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), the non-profit organization that runs AO3, posted that the site was down for maintenance, eventually updating to say the site restoration will take around two weeks, but could take up to a month. OTW confirmed in an updated status report Friday morning that this outage is due to a security incident. 

Some have speculated that the outage is a result of the PHP scramble this week that led to several sites going down to update their security, but AO3 doesn’t use PHP. An OTW representative told CNET: “I can let you know that this is not related to the PHP security issue as the Archive uses Ruby on Rails.” 

A lot of people are grieving the loss of Kinktober, AO3’s annual group writing exercise where writers upload a chapter or fic every day throughout October based on a prompt of the day. (The prompts are horny, if that’s not clear.) Several of the writers and readers who reached out to me following the outage brought up the poor timing around Kinktober.

One writer I spoke to who posts her writing and reads others’ writing on AO3, told me that she was in the middle of racing to finish a work that was deliberately timed to Kinktober and Halloween when the outage happened. She was hitting “next chapter” while reading a fic on Wednesday night when she got the message that the site was down for maintenance, “which I initially took as a sign from the universe to go to bed,” she said.

“The outage hasn’t derailed my desire to write. If anything, I want to have more chapters ready to go so my readers can eat good once it’s over,” she said. 

Some writers are considering posting elsewhere while they wait for AO3 to return, but it’s not an ideal workaround. AO3 author who goes by Selkie Myth told me they’re moving to Space Battles, another fanfiction site, during the outage. “I'm shrugging and just posting on SB [Space Battles] while the site's down. Hopefully I'll remember to post the chapters over on AO3 once it's back up — the story is projected to end during the outage. I anticipate the same is true for a lot of other authors,” they said.

Some people have said they’ll try fanfiction.net in the meantime, but it’s a much more bare-bones website. Fanfiction site Sufficient Velocity added a banner to its homepage welcoming AO3 refugees: “We’ve had a big influx of guests due to the AO3 outage. If you've been affected by the outage we're sorry to hear that and hope that they're able to get that fixed soon.” Wattpad, which many fanfiction writers and readers really, really hate for reasons I won’t get into here, posted on X: “we're here to support you during this difficult time.” Overwhelmingly, the replies are from people telling Wattpad to go away.

Another AO3 writer who goes by Ren told me she has two long works in progress right now with nowhere to post them. Posting elsewhere poses continuity and discovery problems, as some of these fanfiction works span chapters and hundreds of thousands of words of character and worldbuilding. “I could technically keep posting updates on sites like tumblr through the downtime, but both of these fics are quite long and I haven't been posting them anywhere other than AO3 — if I drop a new chapter for my 130k Pokemon Black and White fanfic on Tumblr completely out of context, people just now finding my work aren't going to be able to read the rest for a while :(“ she told me in an email. “I have seen other authors posting their gdocs and Ellipsus reader links in the meantime, but my draft files aren't exactly presentable... I will keep marinating but what will probably happen is my wips [works in progress] will just be on hiatus for a bit. My readers are used to hiatuses at least.” 

Another writer said she’s not considering posting elsewhere. “Wattpad can piss off,” she said. “But I may go back to fanfiction.net to save and physically print some of my favorite fics from way back in the day (the ancient/sacred texts, if you will) to ensure I have copies of those somewhere. This outage is a good reminder that things can vanish in the blink of an eye, whether a website crashes or is hacked or an author decides to suddenly delete their fic. If you love something, smash the kudos button, comment on it, bookmark it, subscribe, and consider downloading it. You never know.” 

A reader who emailed me following the outage said they’ve been enjoying getting into AO3 as a new fan. “I was a big fanfic skeptic, but that’s changed lately. I’ve found some truly excellent writers, and real creativity. The free nature of it in this increasingly horrifying stage of capitalism is refreshing,” they said.

AO3 has said in status updates and to journalists that they don’t expect any data loss. Losing works would be devastating for writers and readers, but AO3 is more than just a repository for writing; it’s a community of people commenting and reacting to those stories. Selkie mentioned the rigorous tagging habits of AO3 members, where stories are tagged with sometimes dozens of fanfiction tropes, character names, content hints and warnings, and can constitute a language specific to the platform and its readers; “Crack Treated Seriously,” for example, means writing a silly premise with a straight face, while “Idiots in Love” is self explanatory. 

“To me, the more devastating thing would be to lose the comments and kudos on my fic. Technically I have them saved elsewhere because I get AO3 email alerts, but seeing them threaded in one place at the end of a chapter hits different,” a writer said. “Comments can turn an author’s entire day around and restore their will to live. I often reread them if I have writer’s block or a bad bout of imposter syndrome. They also turn the otherwise solitary act of writing into something communal. Seeing someone experience your story chapter by chapter is incredibly motivating and makes the writing process feel less isolating.” 

OTW is entirely volunteer-run, and people on social media and in speaking to them directly have said they hope AO3 users go easy on staff during this time. “So many people rely on AO3 as an outlet for creativity and escapism as the real world burns, myself included. It’s also important to remember that the site is run by volunteers,” that writer said. “The work they do to protect writers, fight censorship and safeguard freedom of expression is extremely important and necessary, especially right now. They deserve all the respect and patience in the world as they work to get the archive back up and running. Be kind.” 

Ren, echoing those sentiments, sent me a meme: 

“An additional sentiment I've seen is ‘ok so when AO3 comes back we're all going to tell our favorite authors how much we missed their work, right?’ which I hope catches on — I'm writing for niche fandoms and had to disable guest comments due to bot spam, so comments are few and far between as it is,” Ren said. “I do kind of hope that the extended outage serves as a sort of wake-up call to anyone who's been taking ao3 for granted lately. It certainly was for me.” 

Researchers have amassed a trove of more than 25,000 calls to a support hotline for people during and after psychedelic trips, making it “the largest dataset of psychedelic support interactions ever assembled—exceeding the combined sample sizes of all published psychedelic clinical trials by an order of magnitude,” according to a study published on Friday in Science Advances.

Despite the popularity of psychedelics as recreational drugs, and increasing interest in them as medically-prescribed therapeutic treatments, there is very little research about the effects of these substances outside of clinical settings with carefully-selected patients. That, scientists say, is limiting what we can learn about the effects of these drugs, because the vast majority of psychedelics are consumed by all kinds of people in homes, festivals, ceremonial gatherings, or other uncontrolled environments.    

The Fireside Project, a nonprofit founded in 2020, has filled this knowledge gap with its Psychedelic Support Line, which connects callers who are on bad trips, or who are seeking more information about psychedelics, with trained volunteers who offer confidential peer support. 

The team has now published a compendium of 25,419 anonymized interactions with 220 hotline volunteers that took place between April 2021 and February 2026. The database opens an unprecedented window into the experiences of people on psilocybin, ketamine, MDMA, LSD, ayahuasca, and even cannabis, which is not generally considered a psychedelic but can trigger similar effects, such as mild hallucinations. 

It’s a “treasure trove,” said Félix Schoeller, a senior research scientist at the Institute for Advanced Consciousness Studies, a California-based nonprofit, who led the study, in a call with 404 Media. “In general, we're really lacking any evidence and data beyond what exists in the underground world, if you will, for psychedelic therapy.” 

“There's different types of knowledge,” continued Schoeller, who is CEO of ReWire Neurotechnologies, a startup focused on novel experiential treatments for depression. “Some cultures and communities have been doing that for thousands of years. But there's a question about how to do this in a way that follows the principles of biomedical science.”  

The interactions included phone calls and text exchanges with hotline volunteers who provided support by talking through the experience or connecting callers with emergency services in the most urgent cases. About 40.2 percent of callers (10,208 interactions) were actively tripping, while 32.1 percent of callers reached out after they had tripped, a period known as “integration.”  

The rest of the calls fell into smaller categories, such as informational inquiries about certain substances, requests to prepare or buy drugs, or calls from “trip-sitters” assisting a person on psychedelics. 

Psilocybin was the most commonly reported substance (9,348 callers), followed by LSD (2,247callers), cannabis (2,004 callers), and ketamine (1,194 callers), and MDMA (682 callers), with ayahuasca and other drugs logging much smaller numbers.  

Surprisingly, callers who had used cannabis  reported the highest distress rate—47.2 percent had bad experiences with the drug. Though cannabis has a reputation as a low-stakes substance, the study confirms that it can induce real distress in some cases that warrant consideration for harm reduction. The distress rates for the rest of the commonly used psychedelics were only slightly lower than cannabis, ranging between 40 to 42 percent.

The study also revealed 43 rare but disturbing instances of “facilitator abuse,” including at remote retreats or ceremonial gatherings involving ayahuasca. In these cases, callers reported abuse from the people providing psychedelics, such as reports they had deliberately been given extra doses without consent. 

Those reports “provide the first quantitative documentation of this phenomenon in a community help-seeking sample,” according to the study. “The pattern of these reports—clustering in ceremonial settings involving plant medicines, presenting primarily as trauma-processing calls, and involving callers with elevated rates of prior PTSD diagnoses—suggests that even modest surveillance through existing peer support infrastructure can detect harm occurring in unregulated psychedelic settings.”

Some calls also came from people who said they suffered from schizophrenia, or had taken multiple psychedelics, offering a rare glimpse of situations that could not be observed in clinical settings. 

“This kind of data can inform us on these topics in the context of legalizing these drugs and making them accessible,” said Schoeller. “I'm glad that there's this data that exists that people can look into to support or contradict the claims that they make as to how these things should be done.” 

The study also outlines several limitations, including its sample bias of people who are inclined to call a hotline in the first place—which is not representative of psychedelic consumers at large—as well as self-reported accounts of doses, among other factors that are impossible to verify.

Despite the noisiness of the data, however, it contains helpful clues about avenues for future research. In Schoeller’s view, one of the most important revelations was that the success of a call was strongly linked to the perception that the hotline volunteer showed genuine care and empathy toward the caller. Using 2,777 postinteraction satisfaction surveys, the team found that the few negative experiences with the hotline tended to stem from feelings that the volunteer was dismissive, or didn’t seem to care about the caller. 

“My takeaway is that the number one thing that predicts whether a support call will not work” is “the volunteer being perceived as genuine,” Schoeller said. “That's something that, in many ways, poses a problem to the biomedical system of centralized hospitals. I'm not trying to be ideological in any way, but when you create a centralized institution where you throw everybody to a single place to get care”  then “clinicians become burned out.”

For this reason, Schoeller and his colleagues plan to follow up on the role of perceived care and empathy in treatment, and to emphasize this factor in guidance for community-based peer support for people in crisis due to psychedelics. It also reinforces the value of the Fireside Project’s hotline, which provides a safe and confidential service for people who might be reluctant to contact emergency services because of the criminalization of these substances or fear of incurring medical debt.

“For many people, they have experiences with psychedelics, and they may not be required to go to the ER, but they still need someone to help them navigate the difficult experience,” Schoeller concluded. “The hotline can truly be a lifeline for them.” 

On Friday, Andy Yen, the CEO of Proton, cancelled a series of nearly company-wide ‘re-interviews’ that would have forced employees to explain how they are using AI, with the clear intention that they may be fired if not using it enough in the eyes of Proton leadership, according to six current Proton employees and audio of an around two hour all-hands meeting obtained by 404 Media.

The move came after 404 Media published an investigation on Thursday, which showed how Yen was aggressively pushing AI across Proton, in some cases despite security concerns from employees. In one exchange, an employee in the company’s security Slack channel urged Proton 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.” Yen added, “stop lovingly handcrafting all our code and use AI more.”

The re-interview cancellations likely don’t address the concerns of many Proton users, who are more focused on Proton’s deprioritization of security; many Proton users have blasted the company’s leadership on social media over the last 24 hours and explicitly called for Yen to resign.

The investigation was based on conversations with eight current and one former Proton employees, Slack chats, meeting audio, and an AI manifesto written by the company’s CTO Bart Butler. It painted a picture of Proton that is very different to the public’s perception of a company carefully protecting privacy. Instead, Proton is barreling ahead with AI in large part to achieve more annual revenue. The investigation also found a culture of fear across Proton, where employees have genuine concerns about security or being asked to develop security-focused products with AI, but feel unable to voice them because Yen mocks or insults employees in front of everyone else.

“I don’t think he will change anything, and I think the only reason we had this meeting is because he has a rebellion on his hands,” one employee told 404 Media after the all-hands meeting on Friday.

This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss customer service and Proton fallout.

JASON: Since I wrote about ChatGPT turning me into tech support for people’s random problems, I have gotten many more AI-generated emails from people asking me to solve their tech support problems. So, mission accomplished I guess. I think and hope it was clear in the article, but I think this phenomenon is happening to a lot of journalists, not just us at 404 Media. A lot of the ChatGPT chats I saw told people to reach out to multiple journalists, and gave them contact info and instructions on how to do so. Some suggested that they reach out to lawyers or academic researchers as well, so I assume it’s all sorts of people who are getting this new type of spam. 

My ears perked up when I heard Apple’s new foldable phones were cracking. I licked my lips when the company announced it’s releasing a touch-screen laptop. This was a company that once charged $19 for a polishing cloth, asked $200 for a VESA mount, and sold $700 wheels for the Mac Pro. Now it’s borrowing tired ideas from its competitors and launching hardware its previous leaders rejected.

The once dominant company is struggling to find its feet in an AI-driven post-Tim Cook world. John Ternus is the new CEO — a 25 year veteran of the company with a track record of pushing harebrained hardware schemes like the much reviled Touch Bar and lawsuit inducing butterfly keyboard. 

With Ternus at the helm, I feel there’s a good chance Apple’s best days are behind it, that it will have to make do with less, that it’s déclassé. Apple, blindsided by AI and relying on crowdpleasing hardware gimmicks, is downwardly mobile. It’s in its slop era. The company that once asked consumers to “Think Different” is now releasing hardware that’s just like everything else on the market.

Apple is not adjusting to this new position well. AI boosters agree that Siri AI is awful. Apple HomeView is a $300 Apple Watch meant to replace the family hearth. The iPhone Duo has only been out for a few days and all people can talk about is the cracks, yet Ternus is on the cover of Time Magazine this week holding the folding iPhone Duo and staring at the camera. “The other examples in the world felt kind of cheap and crappy,” Ternus told Time. Many people holding cracked iPhone Duos this week are learning just what (not) cheap and crappy looks like.

Flailing from crackgate, Apple announced the launch of a touch-screen laptop, an idea Steve Jobs extensively tested and said “doesn’t work,” an idea Cook once compared to combining a toaster with a refrigerator. What’s next? What if the toaster-refigerator folded? Ternus has been trying to make an 18-inch foldable iPad happen for years. Maybe Apple will solve the screen cracking issues by then. Or maybe Ternus will continue to try to put a hat on a hat.

I have been waiting for this moment for more than a decade. I am relishing Apple’s recent trajectory more than I should. I confess I harbor a secret and petty grudge.

In 2010, when Apple released the iPhone 4 I was working as a floor manager at a Banana Republic in Dallas. I was interested in smart phones, of course, but Dallas is an expensive city and the iPhone was a luxury. I made do with my Motorola Razr. But the suit-wearing middle management retail psychopaths that were my coworkers saw my lack of an iPhone as a weakness. It was not, as they say now, On Brand.

I had started at the store in the stock room, working my way up to manage the backroom before ascending to a coveted position on the sales floor. The other managers made it clear that a Razr was a “backroom” phone and someone in a prominent position on the floor needed to be seen using an iPhone.

At first, I was not told to buy an iPhone. The message came in the form of subtle and not so subtle bullying deployed over weeks.

“Still using that old phone?” they’d say.“Didn’t you get a raise?” someone would ask a week later.

“Try not to use that thing on the sales floor,” one co-worker told me, pointing at my Razr. “We’re trying to project a certain image here.”

The social pressure had the opposite of its intended effect. I resisted. Eventually one of the friendlier managers pulled me aside. He told me that my colleagues thought it was weird that I didn't have an iPhone. He said I needed to buy one to fit in and he said the store could give me an advance on my paycheck to make it happen.

Ever the contrarian and pissed I was experiencing high school style bullying as a full grown adult, I threw in with Google instead. I got an HTC Dream. My coworkers weren’t happy, but they stopped bringing up the iPhone. 

I’ve been an Android user ever since and studiously avoided Apple products until I broke down a few years ago and bought a Macbook Air. Time heals all wounds and Windows laptops are garbage. I’d even been considering changing from Android to iPhone because the privacy features are more robust. I’ve never been averse to a fast food meal either and maybe I’m a little more comfortable with Apple now that the cracks are starting to show in the foldable phone.