4chan has apparently fallen. The notorious image board that has been the origin of some of the best and absolute worst things that the internet has to offer allegedly fell victim to a hack that has left the site inaccessible since late Monday night through Tuesday morning, according to data from DownDetector. Shortly after reports of the site being down started circulating, a user on a rival image board, soyjack.party, claimed credit for the hack.
According to the Soyjack user, who is trying very hard to have a Machiavelli-meets-shitposter thing going, a hacker managed to get into 4chan’s system over a year ago and laid low to carry out the attack. Through their alleged access, the hacker apparently reopened /qa/, a board that had been shut down for being a unique brand of awful, as well as exposed personal information of 4chan staff and leaked code from the image board.
“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,” the soyjack.party user who was allegedly aware of the hack said over on the competing imageboard.
Through the thread about the hack on Soyjack Party, users shared screenshots that purport to show admin access on 4chan, conversations that took place on private message boards that were only available to moderators, and internal tools that moderators had access to that show the location, host, and IP address of 4chan users. Allegedly, 4chan moderators took the site’s servers offline to try to regain control. The Daily Dot reported that it was able to access a list of supposed contact information of 218 4chan moderators, managers, and janitors. Though Gizmodo has seen the list that’s circulating online, there’s no way to verify its authenticity.
Soyjack posters also claimed that there was a “flood of refugees” from 4chan joining Soyjack Party after the hack, but they are “not adjusting well to the culture.”
That last bit might be the key to the “why” of the hack. Soyjack Party is a 4chan spinoff that is built in large part around the wojack meme, which is frankly a bit old hat at this point. The site was launched in 2020, announced in the 4chan /qa/ board that was ostensibly a “Questions and Answers” forum but was hijacked by users posting wojack and soyjack memes. The /qa/ board was banned by 4chan, in part because it was a board that became a battleground for different factions that used the site. Soyjack Party users seemed to find 4chan’s moderation tactics to be too oppressive and the site to have gone soft, just to give you a sense of what kind of content you might come across on the splinter site.
Soyjack Party users seem to have a history of raiding 4chan-related forums, as Reddit users in the 4chan ecosystem have noted Soyjack Party users flooding different subreddits and forcing them to go private. But the alleged hack seems to be the coup de grâce for the group.
4chan mods, understandably, seem a bit worried about their information getting leaked. Over on a Discord server where parts of the 4chan staff allegedly chat, there are a lot of concerns about the alleged hack and users encouraging each other to take precautions to secure their accounts. Hyperfixed host and longtime tech journalist Alex Goldman pointed out that there is seemingly unconfirmed buzz that some mod emails had .gov domains, which fits into the narrative that 4chan is a honeypot for federal law enforcement—a meme that is popular among Soyjack users.
For what it’s worth, there are lots of people claiming that moderators and janitors have .gov emails, or claiming that most of their IP addresses are in the Washington, D.C. area, but very little that would amount to proof of that. People are happily posting screenshots of the hack, but when it comes to the claims that there are government agents on the site, for whatever reason, no one seems interested in posting evidence. In fact, there are multiple people who claim to have actually parsed through the leaked data and did not find any .gov emails. Also, why would feds trying to operate a secret honeypot use their real email addresses? Anyway, just keep that in mind when you see claims about what the hack “reveals.”
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