4Chan goes down, “temporarily unavailable due to DDoS”

Pandora’s box of the Internet, 4chan.org is currently down. 4chan is the largest online community in the English-speaking world, essentially an imageboard website where people post and discuss pictures, but it is also a notorious group suspected for launching numerous attacks both on and off the Internet.

And it seems that the old idiom, “If you play with fire, you’ll get burned,” rings true today. An announcement on 4Chan’s status page says it has been taken down due to a DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack. “We now join the ranks of MasterCard, Visa, PayPal, et al.—an exclusive club!”

As of posting, downforeveryoneorjustme.com confirms that the site is down. 4chan’s Twitter account confirms the DDoS attack.

As reported by Geekosystem, the Internet vigilante group Anonymous (who has loose ties to 4chan) launched a DDoS attack against Bank of America’s website yesterday, in retaliation to Bank of America’s refusal to process payments or donations to WikiLeaks. Geekosystem speculates that either the banks of the past month may behind the attack (doubtful) or there may be a war with Tumblr brewing (seriously?).

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While the front page is up, the boards and static files are down. On average, 4chan receives over 800,000 posts a day. The site’s founder Christopher “moot” Poole (pictured above) has been described by The Observer as “the most influential web entrepreneur you’ve never heard of.” To date, 4Chan, now 7 years old, hosts 642,022,167 posts and has a user base just shy of 60,000.