As we reported a little while back, 4chan was taken offline by a hack. It wasn’t as sophisticated as some might lead you to believe. One of the biggest reasons was its out-of-date servers and code. Many people were happy about the shutdown, but most people didn’t care anymore. However, it seems that 4chan is back up.
The original site that gave us QAnon and the whole conspiracy “trust the plan” bullshit, hasn’t seen very good days. Especially, since many of the original contributors bolted and started their own versions, most notably 8chan. A post on the website’s official blog, titled “Still Standing,” detailed the timeline of events that led to 4chan’s shutdown earlier this month.
The moderators of the site explained that they took the site offline to prevent any more damage from the hack. It does describe the attack as “catastrophic” due to the fact that it breached a ton of its databases and its most important server.
According to the blog post, the /f/ board will stay shut down. The 4chan team can’t prevent exploits related to the commonly-posted .swf file format. It is for that exact reason, they resurrected 4chan, but disable PDF uploads for now. They claim they will reintroduce it in the near future. Whenever that is.
4chan says it is bringing on volunteers to keep up with the workload of putting the website back together.
As they claim they are not “giving up”, it seems that the reason for the hack was due to their inability to get money to keep the servers current. “Advertisers and payment providers willing to work with 4chan are rare, and are quickly pressured by activists into cancelling (sic) their services,” the blog post read. “Putting together the money for new equipment took nearly a decade.”
It is difficult for older site to stay up-to-date when they fall out of relevancy. The heyday of the site pretty much crashed shortly before the original Trump presidency. QAnon fell out of favor with most people, especially when many (if not all) Q’s predictions failed to materialize. More importantly, the identity of Q was shifting to the site’s owner and operator.
While some people may cheer for the downfall of this site, there are still a lot of clones with far worse people than were on 4chan. I know there are some people that consider these forums a threat, but that’s the way it is. There is no way to get rid of forums like this. They will just go underground, but not gone. Honestly, I only think it’s a matter of time before 4chan is shutdown for good.