Turns out that white nationalists aren’t very good at running websites! 4chan is down, as it was potentially compromised to a permanent end this morning. The famed anonymous message board that began as a place for people to horny post about their favorite anime characters was turned into a white nationalist social network thanks to the edgelords on /pol who captured the attention of the world’s smoothest brains like Elon Musk’s. It was the birthplace of the insane QAnon conspiracy theory now accepted as fact by the Republican Party, and now its journey may be over. This could wind up being 4chan’s last ever post.
4chan has always had the same dynamic as cable news, where it actually broadcasts to a very small group of people, and an even smaller group of people hang on its every word, but the problem is that smaller group of people have immense power. Roughly two to three percent of young men peruse 4chan (to put that in perspective, twelve percent use Pinterest), and its influence has always had the dynamic of being both over- and under-stated. If you’re still a bit confused about how the horny anime website that leaked nude photos of celebrities in 2014 helped inspire Elon Musk to embrace his true Nazi self, don’t worry, so is everyone else. All you really need to know about 4chan is that its entire ethos is embodied in a ketamine-soaked deadbeat dad manchild who thinks that edgelord posts from 19-year-olds hopped up on Adderall are the cutting edge of modern philosophy.
Unfortunately for Elon and the handful of other immensely powerful losers who spend their days reading the thoughts of over-caffeinated teens, their favorite Nazi board may be no more due to a catastrophic hack that has shut the site down entirely. The details are technical and beyond my rudimentary ability to explain them, but the gist of it is that 4chan had incredibly out of date code and the attacker seemed to obtain shell access on the server. Shell access basically means the attacker owns 4chan now, and they are calling themselves the Soyjack Party. Searching for that term does not bring up webpages that support the notion that this is a white hat hacker. The first result returns a site named Soyjack.party with a message board that looks and reads like 4chan. Right on its homepage is an image of the Nazi flag with the phrase “let’s kill n*****” imposed on it.
They have a thread about the 4chan hack, and the top post from 13 hours ago reads “Tonight has been a very special night for many of us at the soyjak party. Today, April 14, 2025, a hacker, who has been in 4cuck’s system for over a year, executed the true operation soyclipse, reopening /qa/, exposing personal information of various 4cuck staff, and leaking code from the site. In an attempt to control the damage, 4cuck admins have taken all servers offline, but there are unconfirmed reports that the servers have already been completely compromised and may not be up for some time. There has been a flood of refugees from 4cuck onto the sharty, most of whom are not adjusting well to the culture.”
These allegations are backed up by sensitive information like IP addresses being released into the ether, as well as security researchers like Kevin Beaumont who said that this looks like the kind of attack that could take 4chan out for a while. Admin and user e-mails are also out there, and they are not difficult to find. This is catastrophic for 4chan, and there is plenty of reason to believe Soyjak Party’s boasts that they effectively own the website now.
Posts on Reddit have surfaced alleging that there are .gov e-mail addresses in the leak, and this unfounded rumor seems to stem from an update in The Sun’s live blog that is no longer there (or never was and the internet fell for Redditors’ trolling again). I cannot find a .gov address in the leak, and there are a litany of posts on Soyjack Party’s website saying they cannot either. This is a big mess, and it would not surprise me given how colossally stupid everyone in this administration is, but as of right now, that falls squarely under the rumor category, as there isn’t a single shred of publicly available evidence even suggesting that a .gov e-mail address was part of the 4chan leak.
4chan may be gone but it was hacked by what looks like a website aiming to replace it. Welcome to the great white power struggle for market share. This all unfolded this morning so it’s too early to say anything definitive other than their out-of-date code got completely pwned, but it definitely does not look like this was the work of altruists seeking to wipe out a white nationalist message board regularly used by like eighteen people and the world’s richest man. Quite the opposite. Today really may be the end of 4chan, but if anything, it will and already has relocated under a different name.
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