The popular image posting website is going down sporadically tonight due to a 4chan led denial of service attack. The login, search registration and voting features are also failing on 9gag.com and no posts posts have been recorded since 17 hours ago. This was presumably to keep 4chan users from uploading obscene images and up-voting them to appear on the front page.
It appears that 4chan users, specifically residents of the /b/ section, are fed up with their content being re-published and shared on 9gag. The attack is also in retaliation to yesterday’s 9gag.com DDoS attack that brought down 4chan’s homepage. The image bellow, originally posted on 4chan.org, sums up their beef succinctly.
Devout channers are using an open source DDoS application called Low Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC) as well as it’s successor High Orbit Ion Cannon (HOIC) and directed their packets towards 9gag’s domain and DNS servers. The call to arms was initiated on 4chan.org/b/ and instructions were issued on pastebin.
A few 9gag users posted this in response to the attack
