https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/jgqv7b/people-are-reading-so-much-fanfiction-its-crashing-the-biggest-fanfic-website

Over the weekend fanfiction website Archive of our Own went down, to the dismay of fanfic readers everywhere. While it's not the result of any one fic, despite what some fans thought, it's a reflection of how much the pandemic has changed our fanfiction reading habits.

Archive of our Own is a website to archive transformative works, also known as fanfiction. Fanfiction uses the fictional boundaries of someone else's fiction in order to tell new stories with those characters and in those universes. While fanfiction is mostly associated with lovesick, teenage Twilight fans who insert themselves into their favorite novels, fanfiction and the associated cultural force of fandom has become the default view of what it means to be a fan. For some fans, especially in particularly online fandoms, reading fanfiction and reacting to it is a huge part of how they express their fandom. Over time, Archive of Our Own has been recognized as both a very popular website and a culturally important one, eventually winning a Hugo Award for best related work.