4chan, the controversial forum known for the birth of early meme culture and Gamergate, is down after a suspected hack. According to Downdetector, reports of the outage began to arrive late Monday night, and users were sharing information about connectivity issues until Tuesday morning. At the time of writing, the site can be accessed after a long delay, but clicking on any of the links in the forum leads to a timeout.
According to the screenshots posted on Imgur (NSFW warning), it appears that the hacker accessed the 4chan hosting server via the command interface. He then posted an image of the site’s phpmyadmin page and appears to have poisoned the entire moderator team as well as many of the site’s registered users. While some users appear to have taken steps to protect their identities, many used their primary email address to register for the forum, with .edu and even .gov addresses appearing on the leaked message list.
It is unclear what this means for the future of 4chan, but some social media and Reddit users are speculating that this could be the end of the most famous forum on the Internet. In addition to poisoning a large portion of 4chan’s users, the hacker also leaked the site’s source code, revealing security holes that have existed since about the time Hiroyuki Nishimura bought the forum from founder Christoper Poole. Restoring a more secure version of 4chan could take months.
If this is the end of 4chan, it will be the most significant deplatforming of far-right internet users since the temporary shutdown of Kiwi Farms in 2022.
