4chan, the controversial imageboard where users can anonymously post anything and everything, is experiencing downtime as of this morning. Thousands of visitors reported outages on Tuesday, according to DownDetector. (Disclosure: Ziff Davis owns both Mashable and Down Detector.)
The current speculation among users is that 4chan was hacked by an attacker taking advantage of an exploit in an outdated version of PHP that the site still ran on, but we have not been able to verify these rumors.
4chan hasn’t changed much since Christopher Poole, aka “moot,” founded it in 2003. The imageboard has evolved over the years from a user base consisting of Anonymous hacktivists to fringe far-right wingers. Poole sold 4chan to Hiroyuki Nishimura, the owner of competing Japanese imageboard 2channel, in 2015 after taking a job with Google. Since then, according to users, it appears very little has been done to upgrade the site’s tech.
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Users are trading rumors that the site’s source code and database were leaked. If any data is leaked, the most sensitive data would likely belong to 4chan’s volunteer moderators and could consist of their login credentials and chat logs. (Again, we haven’t been able to independently verify these rumors.) We’ll update this story if we learn any concrete information, but for now, we can only confirm that the 4chan outage is ongoing.
On social media, users have latched onto the alleged last post they reportedly saw before the site went down: An image of Jack Black from A Minecraft Movie accompanied by the words “CHICKEN JOCKEY.”
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