4chan, the infamously crude message board, is currently down due to a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack and has been since the early morning hours according to the site’s Twitter account. The attack comes just a day after similar attacks slowed down Bank of America’s Web services.
4chan founder Moot announced that the site was down at 2:39 a.m. PST, saying “Site is down due to DDoS. We now join the ranks of MasterCard, Visa, PayPal, et al.–an exclusive club!” The site’s Twitter account announced the outage in a similarly humorous style:
The 4chan status page lists several parts of the site as being up, but “Boards”, “Post images” and “Static files” are all listed as down and the site barely loads after a minute or two. Even this, however, is changing over time with the intensity of the attacks. Geekosystem editor Robert Quigley ponders who could be behind the attack, asking if it could be Tumblr users still hanging on to the Tumblr/4chan battle of earlier this year. Quiqley goes on to wonder if it could be the banks themselves acting in retaliation or even 4chan itself.
It would be a move straight out of a movie to DDoS attack yourself, wouldn’t it? What’s the best way to prove your own innocence? Make yourself the victim.
We don’t have any information on who is behind the attacks, but that would be some high drama right there. The safer bet, though, might be that supporters of the various sites that have been taken down by Anonymous are retaliating. We’ll keep an eye out on 4chan’s status page for an explanation.
