Two of America’s largest social media platforms both went down during the week of April 14.
Spotify went down somewhere in the wee hours of April 16. Many users awoke to an error code message and an inability to play media or engage with media. The company acknowledged the outage around 8 AM, posting to X, “We’re aware of some issues right now and are checking them out!”
By midday, the music and podcast streaming service was back online. The company’s social media account has yet to formally explain the service lapse, but it later posted, in part, “The reports of this being a security hack are false.”
We are aware of the outage and working to resolve it as soon as possible. The reports of this being a security hack are false.
— Spotify Status (@SpotifyStatus) April 16, 2025
Many people had been concerned about attacks on digital media platforms since 4chan went down the day before. The imageboard website went offline sometime in the evening of April 14 or the morning of April 15.
A Reddit poster claimed a hacker had gained access to sensitive internal communications from 4chan staff and was leaking them. However, parts of the Reddit thread have now been deleted, and The Dallas Express was unable to pursue the supposedly leaked information further.
On X, there has been a flurry of discussions about 4chan’s moderators, known as “Janitors” or “Jannies,” having their credentials and chat logs exposed. If authentic, this leaked data could expose the anonymous moderators’ identities, previously unknown details about company policies, and source code.
The fact jannies on 4chan had private reasons to ban people is hilarious and shows how much of powertripping idiots they are. Hiro after taking ownership literally did nothing to improve the site, moot should of thought twice about who would succeed him pic.twitter.com/pJ7PIBTeJq
— Punished 4AGE Shill 💢 (@Punished_4AGE) April 15, 2025
The confusion of the situation has lent itself to rumor and counter-rumor on X. In the style of a 4chan post, one X user wrote, “>4chan gets f**ked and had .gov jannies >old 8chan users right now after having governments shut them down.”
The notion that some of the 4chan moderators were somehow connected to American government agencies was countered with a Community Note that read, “None of the 4chan moderators who had their emails leaked had a .gov at the end [link omitted] .”
At the time of this writing (2 PM April 16), the website remains down. The press has largely described the failure as a “hack,” and given the outage, DX was unable to contact 4chan for comment on that description.
It is unclear where the hack originated from or if it was indeed a hack. However, the World Economic Forum’s 2025 Insight Report indicated that numerous business leaders and Chief Information Security Officers believed there would be an increase in cyber attacks, among other global phenomena, over the next two years.