After a significant cyberattack and prolonged outage, 4chan is back online, facing ongoing challenges and calls for improved security.
The internet’s most infamous imageboard is back! But not without battle scars.
4chan, the notorious anonymous forum that has influenced much of online culture (for better and worse), has officially come back online after a nearly two-week shutdown triggered by a severe cyberattack. The outage, which began around April 14, left many wondering whether the site would ever recover.
In a blog post titled “Still Standing”, 4chan’s administrators addressed the chaos, confirming the platform had been “starved of money” and severely impacted by the hack.
“Over the following days, 4chan’s development team surveyed the damage, which to be frank, was catastrophic. While not all of our servers were breached, the most important one was, and it was due to simply not updating old operating systems and code in a timely fashion.”
The website even took a jab at the News house Wired that previously published a piece titled “4chan Is Dead. Its Toxic Legacy Is Everywhere.” 4chan took to X in a rebuttal quoting the article and wrote "Wired says ‘4chan Is Dead.’ Is that so?”
The attack exposed internal backend data, moderator lists, and administrative tools — a major breach that rattled even 4chan’s most hardened users. Screenshots of the platform’s internal systems quickly circulated online, with one anonymous 4chan moderator or “Janitor” telling TechCrunch, “I have no reason to believe otherwise,” when asked if the leaked data was legitimate.
While 4chan is technically back online, it’s far from fully operational. Many users are still facing slow load times, missing boards, and intermittent service interruptions.
The breach not only revealed how vulnerable the platform’s internal systems were but also reignited long-standing debates about 4chan’s ability to survive in today’s tech environment. Despite its influence, the site has often operated on razor-thin margins — and now, it’s clear that both technical and financial stability are ongoing challenges. In the blog post 4chan stated that:
“In April of 2024 we had agreed on specs and began looking for possible suppliers. Money is always tight for us, and few companies were willing to sell us servers, so actually buying the hardware wasn’t a trivial problem.” they further added “Over the next few months we slowly moved functionality onto the new servers, but we had still been relying on the old servers for key functions.”
As 4chan tries to patch the damage and rebuild trust, one thing is certain: love it or loathe it, the platform’s outsized influence on the internet isn’t going away anytime soon.
