4Chan, the anonymous message board linked to targeted harassment campaigns and the alt-right, is currently offline for thousands of users amid unverified reports on social media that the site has been hacked.
The trouble began at about 4am UK time on Tuesday morning, according to DownDetector.
Here’s what we know so far about the alleged 4Chan hack and subsequent disruption.
Was 4Chan hacked?
The cause of the outage has yet to be confirmed, but rumours of a hack are spreading rapidly on social media, particularly on the Reddit forum r/4Chan.
Posts on Reddit and X (formerly Twitter) suggested the alleged hack may have exposed serious security flaws at 4Chan.
4chan got hacked by the sharty, they restored /QA/, they leaked the jannies passwords, their IRC, the site is slowing down, this is MASSIVE pic.twitter.com/Nzpn6rGl5o
— Priniz (@Priniz_twt) April 15, 2025
Users are claiming that the site’s so-called “janitors” – unpaid moderators – have had their passwords and private IRC (internet relay chat) channels leaked, along with internal staff emails. One user described the breach as “massive,” suggesting the attacker even restored a defunct board called /QA/ and gained deep access to the site’s systems.
Others speculated that the hacker exploited long-neglected software vulnerabilities.
My theory on 4chan's hack is that he found the origin IP of the root server through Cloudflare somehow, then used a public exploit. They're running FreeBSD 10.1, which reached end-of-life in 2016. I don't think anyone has updated it since moot left. pic.twitter.com/0jUHGpLju3
— Josh (@XJosh) April 15, 2025
According to multiple posts, 4Chan’s servers were running on FreeBSD 10.1 – an operating system version that hasn’t been officially supported since 2016 – along with outdated PHP code and insecure database functions.
If true, the claims paint a picture of a website that may not have been properly updated or maintained for years, leaving it wide open to modern hacking techniques.
What is 4Chan?
Founded in 2003 by then-teenager Christopher Poole, known online as “moot”, 4Chan was designed as an English-language offshoot of the Japanese forum 2channel (now 5ch).
The site lets users post text and images with no need to register an account, fostering an unpredictable mix of online creativity, chaos and controversy. Over the years, 4Chan became the birthplace of countless viral internet trends and memes – from LOLcats and Rickrolling to the rise of Pepe the Frog – but its free-for-all culture also made it a haven for trolls, extremists and cybercriminals.
So 4chan very likely got hacked because they were running on an extremely out of date version of PHP that has a lot of vulnerabilities and exploits and are using deprecated function to interact with there MySQL database.
— Yushe (@_yushe) April 15, 2025
Web security 101: Keep your code and software up to date. pic.twitter.com/JFDOsbr5rt
4Chan has long been associated with hacking culture, most famously as the birthplace of the online collective known as Anonymous.
The group – known for its Guy Fawkes mask symbol and digital protest campaigns – first emerged from 4Chan’s message boards in the mid-2000s, where all users are referred to as “Anon” by default due to the site’s anonymous posting system.
Originally a source of internet pranks, Anonymous evolved into a global “hacktivist” movement, launching cyberattacks against governments, corporations and organisations such as the Church of Scientology.
My theory on 4chan's hack is that he found the origin IP of the root server through Cloudflare somehow, then used a public exploit. They're running FreeBSD 10.1, which reached end-of-life in 2016. I don't think anyone has updated it since moot left. pic.twitter.com/0jUHGpLju3
— Josh (@XJosh) April 15, 2025
4Chan has also been linked to several major online scandals. In 2014, users of the site were central to Celebgate, a massive leak of stolen nude photos from the private iCloud accounts of celebrities like Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton and Kirsten Dunst.
That same year, 4Chan was at the centre of the so-called Gamergate controversy – a months-long harassment campaign directed at female game developers, journalists and critics under the guise of pushing for ethics in video game journalism.
Perhaps most troubling is the site’s connection to real-world violence. Over the years, a number of mass shooters have posted manifestos or attack plans on 4Chan or its more extreme spinoff, 8Chan, before carrying out deadly attacks.
The most notorious example was the 2019 Christchurch mosque shooting in New Zealand, where the gunman used these platforms to share his racist views and link to his livestream of the massacre.
These incidents have cemented 4Chan’s reputation as one of the web’s most unruly — and sometimes dangerous — online spaces.
