[UPDATED] By Blocking 4-chan, Verizon Has Painted A Target On Its Chest

Updated – please see the end of the post.

4-chan has reportedly been blocked on Verizon Wireless devices.

In a statement on the official 4-chan status blog, the site’s enigmatic founder ‘moot’ claimed, “we’ve received confirmation from Verizon’s Network Repair Bureau (NRB) that we are ‘explicitly blocked.'”

While it does not appear that the block has extended to Verizon’s FIOS or Home Broadband services, moot also claimed that Verizon users from these services had been complaining about intermittent outages over the past few weeks.

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At this time, Verizon Wireless is claiming that “some 4-chan sites were disrupting our network.”

If they were disrupting your network before, Verizon, then you’re really going to enjoy what’s going to happen next. The last time a similar block was thrown up against 4-chan, by AT&T in July 2009, it sparked a 4-chan firestorm. Some users responded to the block by blocking AT&T IP ranges and/or redirecting them to pages explaining why they had been denied service. Others boycotted AT&T as an ISP and switched their service to other providers. Fortunately for AT&T, moot called off the hounds before more than one report that the AT&T CEO had died was released.

While Verizon’s Twitter feed apologized for the down time as soon as they possibly could, it will be interesting to see whether or not this will be enough to hold off a similar reaction. Verizon’s best bet to avoid an interruption in traffic for their subscribers would be to apologize to moot personally. While the users of 4-chan don’t forget, a sincere apology to the site’s admin (who has a dedicated following) would likely keep the situation from getting too far out of hand.

Protip: don’t bite the hand of a crazy man.

UPDATE: 4-chan appears to be back online, although Verizon reps are said to be watching for any more block-worthy activity for the moment.