4chan is partly back online after a hack took the infamous image-sharing site down for nearly two weeks.
The site first went down on April 14, with the person responsible for the hack apparently leaking data including a list of moderators and “janitors” (one janitor told TechCrunch they were “confident” that the leaked data was real).
4chan’s extended disappearance led to at least one premature obituary, with journalist Ryan Broderick writing for Wired that “what began as a hub for internet culture and an anonymous way station for the internet’s anarchic true believers devolved over the years into a fan club for mass shooters, the central node of Gamergate, and the beating heart of far-right fascism around the world.”
But the 4chan team responded defiantly in a post on X: “Wired says ‘4chan is dead.’ Is that so?”
And on Friday, the site came back online. Shortly afterward, a post on the official 4chan blog in said “a hacker using a UK IP address” was able to gain access to one of 4chan’s servers using a “bogus PDF upload,” subsequently “exfiltrating database tables and much of 4chan’s source code,” then beginning to “vandalize 4chan at which point moderators became aware and 4chan’s servers were halted, preventing further access.”
The damage, the post said, was “catastrophic.”
“Ultimately this problem was caused by having insufficient skilled man-hours available to update our code and infrastructure, and being starved of money for years by advertisers, payment providers, and service providers who had succumbed to external pressure campaigns,” the post said, later adding, “Advertisers and payment providers willing to work with 4chan are rare, and are quickly pressured by activists into cancelling their services.”
The breached server was subsequently replaced, the post said, although the site has new limitations — PDF uploads are “temporarily” disabled, and a board for sharing Flash animations has been left offline as the team saw “no realistic way to prevent similar exploits using .swf files.”
As of Sunday afternoon, the site’s status checker showed that the boards and front page were up, while posting, images, and thumbnails were not working.
“4chan is back,” the post said. “No other website can replace it, or this community. No matter how hard it is, we are not giving up.”