Notorious internet forum 4chan has been rocked by ongoing disruptions and alleged data leaks after a disgruntled offshoot of its userbase reportedly hacked its systems.

At a glance, 4chan appears to be a simple imageboard website used to share memes and host niche discussion groups — though the site has become better known for its links to various cyberattacks, conspiracy groups, and events such as the 2020 US Capitol riot and New Zealand’s 2019 Christchurch mosque attacks.

Last Tuesday, in what appeared to be a long-awaited revenge plot, members of a rival imageboard claimed an alleged cyberattack on 4chan which leaked source code and caused intermittent website outages that have lasted more than a week.

A user on Soyjak (an imageboard founded by previously exiled 4chan users) leaked apparent screenshots of 4chan’s staff administrator panels and maintenance tools in a post which boasted a “very special night for many of us at the soyjak party”.

“Today, April 14, 2025, a hacker, who has been in 4cuck's [sic] system for over a year, executed the true operation soyclipse [sic],” wrote Soyjak user ‘Chud’.

“In an attempt to control the damage, 4cuck [sic] admins have taken all servers offline.”

Among the alleged evidence of the hack were screenshots of user access logs, database administration panels, website maintenance tools, and a list of emails allegedly belonging to 4chan’s admins, moderators, and lower-privileged website “janitors”.

If truly hacked, some of the published systems and tools could be used to expose users’ geographical locations and IP addresses, restart forums, view staff messages, and moderate user bans.

The Soyjak group, which also calls itself “The Party”, further celebrated “unconfirmed reports” that servers have already been “completely compromised” and “may not be up for some time”.

Social media users have meanwhile described 4chan as being “nuked” and lamented that the site’s unavailability could see a mass-migration of its userbase to other platforms such as Reddit and X.

4chan claimed to have attracted 22 million unique monthly visitors as of May 2024, with half of those being in the US.

At the time of writing, 4chan’s website was inaccessible.

‘Soyjacks’ seek revenge

Soyjak members also celebrated the return of ‘qa’ — a 4chan question-and-answer board that was removed in 2021 after a subcommunity of users flooded it with conflicts from other imageboards and criticisms of the platform’s moderators.

The downfall of /qa/ was what led to the eventual creation of soyjak.party, a rival website where the ‘Soyjak’ movement congregates to share Soyjak-specific (and often hateful) meme content.

Following the recent 4chan attack, users attempting to access the site have intermittently reported the ‘qa’ board being restored there, alongside the message “/QA/ Returns, Soyjak.party won”.

X user ‘Priniz’, who posted ongoing updates from soyjak.party’s hack thread, shared an alleged staff email from 4chan that warned leaked “usernames, password hashes, email addresses and IP address” were used to “partially or fully dox” some 4chan mods and janitors.

Soyjak user Chud meanwhile encouraged the perpetrators to continue their attacks on 4chan.

“The more damage you can cause the better,” they wrote.

“Hopefully it will have [real life] consequences.”

Is this the end of 4chan?

X user ‘yushe’ posted alleged confirmation that the anonymous Soyjak hacker “posted the entire source code” for 4chan, revealing the platform was using deprecated PHP scripting functions to interact with its database.

“This is extremely bad,” wrote yushe.

“If the developers are smart they should keep the website down until they update the source code and software.”

Emiliano De Cristofaro, a computer science and engineering professor at US university UC Riverside, told Wired it seemed true that “4chan hasn't been properly maintained and patched for years, which might indicate that a hack would have definitely been a possibility”.

“It might be hard or at least painfully slow and costly for 4chan to recover from this, so we might really see the end of 4chan as we know it,” said Cristofaro.

4chan addressed the incident by making its first post to X in more than two years: a seemingly AI-generated image of a cat drinking coffee alongside the caption “it takes time”.

“We need time, cats, ponies and so on,” wrote 4chan.