The controversial but popular message board site 4chan has reportedly been hacked and has remained inaccessible to the public.

The hackers crashed the 4chan.org site and leaked the personal info of all of the moderators (or “Jannies”), revealing a bunch of information about how the site is run in the process, according to netizen reporting.

As of Tuesday morning, numerous users from around the world are reporting they are still unable to access the site, which Niche Gamer can confirm remains inaccessible at the time of writing.

Meanwhile, the leaks of the moderators information revealed that very little work had been on the website since “Moot” (Christopher Poole, the former owner) left in 2015. This appears to be how the site was hacked, due to the hacker managing to get root access from an old version of FreeBSD.

Even more alarming to many users is the information that was leaked revealing that the IP address and physical location of every 4chan user was available to the mods at all times.

As an X poster summarized, “It’s worse than that, all the 4chan source code got dumped and the IP and location of every single poster is visible to the mods at all times… they also write notes about individual posters… the site really was a FBI honeypot.”

Some people think this might be the end of 4chan, but it’s more likely the site will be functional again in the next few weeks – albeit with fewer users due to the controversial revelations of the hack.

Some commenters called 4chan obsolete compared to what it was before Twitter became X. As one poster said, “4chan isn’t as popular as it used to be because now you can post most of that stuff on X without being suspended. Ye literally posted porn to tens of millions of views and didn’t even get an hour time out.”

Even of this is true, 4chan still has tens of thousands of daily users who would miss it if it went away. 4chan has been an important force on the internet since the mid-2000s. 

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