The website 4chan was taken offline Sunday by a distributed denial-of-service attack, and the team behind 4chan is still struggling to get back online. On Sunday morning, 4chan's status blog reported: "Site down due to a large DDoS attack. We hope to have it back up soon."
There were reports yesterday that 4chan was accessible again, though moving incredibly slowly. We haven't been able to access 4chan.org this afternoon, and 4chan's status page was updated this morning with the message: "Site continues to be down due to a DDoS attack, consisting of a UDP flood on port 80."
4chan normally gets 1.6 million daily visitors and 39 million page views, if WolframAlpha's data is accurate. The site has been a magnet for various Internet memes and controversies, and has been connected to DDoS attacks on other sites.
In July 2009 we reported that AT&T was blocking access to parts of 4chan because of a denial-of-service attack coming from IP addresses connected to the domain. 4chan itself was hit by DDoS attacks about a week apart in late December 2010 and early January 2011. Technical issues took the site down temporarily in March and October, but 4chan had gone 10 months without suffering another DDoS attack until this week. 4chan hasn't made any public comments about who is behind this week's DDoS.
UPDATE: As of Wednesday, the 4chan site is back online. Also, 4chan's status blog now reports that the attack was a TCP SYN flood, and not a UDP flood as previously believed.
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