4chan is partially back online after a hacker attack took the infamous image-sharing site offline for nearly two weeks.
The site first went down on April 14, when the person responsible for the hack apparently leaked data, including a list of moderators and “cleaners” (one of the cleaners told TechCrunch that they were “confident” the data leak was genuine).
4chan‘s prolonged disappearance has led to at least one premature obituary: journalist Ryan Broderick wrote for Wired that “what started as a center of online culture and an anonymous station for anarchic true believers on the Internet has over the years morphed into a mass shooter fan club, a Gamergate hub, and the beating heart of far-right fascism around the world.”
But the 4chan team responded defiantly in a post to X: “Wired says ‘4chan is dead’. Is it true?”
And on Friday, the site came back online. Shortly thereafter, the official 4chan blog posted that a “hacker using a UK IP address” was able to access one of 4chan’s servers using a “fake PDF upload” and then “stole the database tables and most of 4chan’s source code” and then began “vandalizing 4chan, after which moderators became aware of this and 4chan’s servers were shut down to prevent further access.”
The damage, as noted in the post, was “catastrophic.”
“Ultimately, this problem was caused by insufficient skilled man-hours to update our code and infrastructure, and by advertisers, payment providers, and service providers who succumbed to external pressure campaigns going out of business for years,” the post reads, later adding: “Advertisers and payment providers willing to work with 4chan are rare and are quickly pressured by activists to withdraw their services.”
The hacked server was subsequently replaced, although new restrictions appeared on the site – PDF uploads were “temporarily” disabled, and the Flash animation board remained offline, as the team sees “no realistic way to prevent similar exploits using .swf files.”
As of Sunday afternoon, a check of the site’s status showed that the boards and homepage were working, while posts, images, and thumbnails were down.
“4chan is back,” the post read. “No other website can replace it or this community. No matter how hard it is, we are not giving up.”
