8chan message board finds new home for hate

BOSTON — The online message board 8chan suffered sporadic outages Monday after its cybersecurity provider cut it off for what it called a “cesspool of hate” following mass shootings in Texas and Ohio.

But the board, which has a history of use by violent extremists, also quickly found a new online host, Epik.com. That company also provides such support for Gab.com, another social media site frequented by white supremacists that doesn’t ban hate speech.

8chan was up and down after the security company Cloudflare said it would no longer provide services that protect web sites from denial-of-service attacks that can make them unreachable.

The operators of 8chan said there might be downtime in the next one or two days as the site sought a solution, and online records indicated the site had been moved to a new domain host: Sammamish, Washington-based web services provider Epik.com.

The company bills itself on its site as “the Swiss bank of domains.”

Police are investigating commentary posted on 8chan and believed to have been written by the suspect in a shooting Saturday that killed 22 people in El Paso, Texas.

If there is a connection, it would be the third known instance of a shooter posting to the site before going on a rampage. The shooters also did so before a mass shooting at two New Zealand mosques in the spring and at a California synagogue.

The suspect in El Paso “appears to have been inspired” by discussions on 8chan, said Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince in a blog post on his company’s site. He said a suspect in an earlier shooting at a synagogue in Poway, California, also posted a “hate-filled ‘open letter’” on 8chan.

“8chan has repeatedly proven itself to be a cesspool of hate,” wrote Prince. “They have proven themselves to be lawless and that lawlessness has caused multiple tragic deaths.”

Services like Cloudflare or Bitmitigate that host and protect websites are necessary to keep contentious, extremist-tolerant message boards like 8chan online because they typically attract hostile traffic from hacktivists aimed at overwhelming the sites and making them unreachable.

Two years ago, Cloudflare terminated service to the Daily Stormer, a neo-nazi and white supremacist site founded by Andrew Anglin, a native of Worthington.