8chan defiantly vowed to stay online, but was cut off by tech firm
The battle over whitesupremacist and extremist content online surged into the tangled pipelines of the Web on Monday as jockeying among rival tech firms knocked the 8chan message board and other hate sites offline.
It was unclear how long they’d stay unavailable to their followers as several players in the little-seen world of internet service firms dug in to prevent the sites’ reappearance.
Abandoned by its key partner Cloudflare for its “lawlessness” in the wake of the El Paso mass shooting, 8chan briefly disappeared from the Web early Monday before reappearing with the help of a sympathetic ally: BitMitigate, whose cybersecurity services also helped keep the neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer online after Cloudflare dropped it in 2017.
But by Monday afternoon, both 8chan and the Daily Stormer plunged into darkness when Voxility, a tech firm that has leased servers to BitMitigate, announced that it would no longer provide those services. The site for BitMitigate, which is based in Vancouver, Washington, also dropped offline.
It’s “totally against our policy,” Maria Sirbu, a Voxility executive, told The Washington Post. “As soon as we were notified ... we proceeded with ( completely) removing” the company from their network.
She said Voxility was making a “firm stand” and urged that many other internet authorities should take more action in “keeping the internet a safer place.”
Shortly after noon, Ron Watkins, 8chan’s administrator, said that the site was down and that it looked like its content-delivery network, provided by BitMitigate, was “under attack.” Minutes later, he said that BitMitigate had instead been “deplatformed for hosting 8chan.”
The war drew attention to the role played by the Internet’s hidden infrastructure in deciding what ideas and content can circulate online.
Most of the key players in Monday’s fight are unknown to consumers, but they run some of the critical elements supporting the modern web.
BitMitigate is owned by another company, Epik, a firm based outside Redmond, Washington, that bought the service earlier this year. Epik, a hosting and domain-name firm that gained notoriety after backing the far-right site Gab, has loudly criticized what it calls “digital censorship” and “organized efforts to de-platform and incapacitate practitioners of lawful free speech.”
Epik chief Rob Monster wrote Monday that the company had not solicited 8chan’s business but was now helping manage some of the site’s technical needs and was further evaluating whether to offer it other services, including a defense against cyberattacks.