4chan down: who and why

ITS FUCKING OVER. FREAK THE FUCK OUT if you've EVER visited the website just once ALL YOUR DATA is out there!!!!!

Just kidding. This will not affect you in the slightest. here is some information on the attack

I should start this by saying that much as anything related to 4chan, everyone involved genuenly has no life and it is quite upseting to see. tw: transphobia, su1cidie

UPDATE!!: as of 26/04/2025 at ~1 a.m. GMT 4chan is back up and running. Nothing ever happens.

WHO DID IT AND WHY

The group claiming resposibility for the attacks are Soyjack[.]party a.k.a. the sharty users. This is a "rival" imageboard to 4chan centered around creating, posting and sharing soyjaks. if you've been on the internet these past 4 years, you've likely seen countless soyjaks that originate on this board.

The board itself originates in September 2020 when 4chan's /qa/ (Questions and Answers) board was deleted following a raid on the /lgbt/ board, during which at least one transgender user was allegedly pressured into commiting suicide. Many of the users of /qa/ then migrated to sharty and since then there's been a bitter (one-sided) rivalry between the two sites. I cannot stress this enough, do not visit soyjak[.]party, they are quite literally 4chan rejects, site contains a dedicated /incel/ board aswell as a /pol/ imitation board, and the site genarally has even less moderation than 4chan.

WHAT HAPPENED

On the 14th of April the attackers abused vulnerabilities in 4chan's admin's total neglet for security and the website running an extremely out of date version of PHP. But I'm not really here to talk about these sort of technical details, for that read this thread by _yushe on twitter. Once the hackers gained total control of the website they pretty much could do whatever they wanted. And they did:

/QA/ RETURNS

Of course, one of the first things the attackers did was bringing back their oh so precious /qa/ board. This was more of a "fuck you" rather than an actual attempt at getting the board back up on the site.

SOURCE CODE & /J/ BOARD LEAKS

On Kiwifarms user Coberald posted a copy of the leaked 4chan source code.

Following said post, another user named Tofflenheim shared an archive of /j/, this being a private board where 4chan jannies (unpaid moderators) would reside. This was posted along with the IP address of every moderator, and eventually their email addresses and personal details would be leaked aswell.

CLARIFICATION: It is unconfirmed if any jannies had .gov email addresses, however at least 2 had registered a .edu email address.

Private moderator chats were also leaked, but the validity of these screenshots is weak.

With the /j/ board leak and the ridiculousness of using a .edu email to mod on fucking 4chan, jannitors were being made fun of more than ever.

WARNING: Be cautius when visiting Kiwifarms, as it is a forum solely dedicated to the online harassment of others.

IP LEAKS

With the source code leaks it has been revealed that 4chan pretty aggresively fingerprints everything done on the site, meaning it was never as anonymous as once thought. This and the .edu mod email addresses have fueled the already existing theory that the entire site had become (or was from the beginning) either a fed honeypot or being actively used by governments to radicalize users.

CLARIFICATION: Also adding fuel to the fire, a screenshot claiming that the majority of posts on the notoriusly antisemetic /pol/ board actually came from Israel. This is completely false and just an attempt to create more antisemetic conspiracy theories.

The hackers have come out and stated that they have no interest in leaking user data.

IT'S THE END

Following all this, 4chan servers have been taken down.

Slowly but surely. Less traffic. More errors.

Chaos. Cope.

And finally, the last ever post on 4chan.