AT&T unblocks 4chan

YESTERDAY we reported how AT&T was on the verge of committing web suicide by blocking access to the 4Chan site.

Initially it seemed that AT&T had had enough of the site, which is a home for Internet pranksters and hackers. Blocking access did start the first shots of a war between AT&T and 4Chan's troublesome user base.

Within a few hours some of them had posted a fake rumor about the death of AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson with the intent to lower AT&T's stock price and other action was planned. But now it appears that AT&T has unblocked 4chan.

Writing in his bog, the owner of 4Chan, Moot, said that it had all been a terrible mishtake.

"For the past three weeks, 4chan has been under a constant DDoS attack. We were able to filter this specific type of attack in a fashion that was more or less transparent to the end user," he said.

But the trick he used meant that some Internet users received errant traffic from one of the network switches. A handful happened to be AT&T customers.

As a result AT&T filtered all traffic to and from img.4chan.org IPs (which serve /b/ & /r9k/) for its entire network, instead of only the affected customers. Unfortunately AT&T did not contact 4chan prior to implementing the block and that is where things went wrong.

Moot said that in the end, this wasn't a sinister act of censorship, but rather a bit of a mistake.

"Whoever pulled the trigger on blackholing the site probably didn't anticipate, nor intend, the consequences of doing so," he said. µ