Everyone got upset earlier because it looked like AT&T had banned notorious website 4chan for hosting tasteless content and maybe for inventing annoying memes. But no! The site was blocked for a purported hack attack against AT&T.

AT&T spokesman Michael Cole sent us the following statement, saying AT&T's network was swamped with attacks from the server that hosts 4chan's infamous "/b/" forum, so AT&T blocked 4chan for a while:

Beginning Friday, an AT&T customer was impacted by a denial-of-service attack stemming from IP addresses connected to img.4chan.org. To prevent this attack from disrupting service for the impacted AT&T customer, and to prevent the attack from spreading to impact our other customers, AT&T temporarily blocked access to the IP addresses in question for our customers. This action was in no way related to the content at img.4chan.org; our focus was on protecting our customers from malicious traffic.

Overnight Sunday, after we determined the denial-of-service threat no longer existed, AT&T removed the block on the IP addresses in question. We will continue to monitor for denial-of-service activity and any malicious traffic to protect our customers.

4chan itself has come under denial of service attack recently; if the site's online enemies actually managed to gain access to the site's servers (via a different type of attack), they could have used it as a proxy to hit AT&T. Or maybe someone figured out how to trick /b/'s bulletin board software into doing the same thing; lord knows the online hangout is popular with plenty of crafty script kiddies.

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