The head of Cloudflare — the U.S. company that helps keep 8chan online — on Sunday said his company will stop hosting the fringe online platform known for supporting white supremacists.

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince's decision comes shortly after a gunman in El Paso, Texas, allegedly posted an anti-immigrant manifesto to 8chan before killing 20 people and injuring two dozen more.

If investigators conclude the manifesto did come from the gunman, it will be the third incident this year in which a suspect is believed to have posted a hateful, white extremist screed to 8chan — the anonymous message board which dubs itself the "darkest reaches of the Internet" — before committing a mass shooting.

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Prince laid out his plans to pull his company's service from 8chan in a blog post on Sunday night . He said they would cut ties by midnight on the West Coast.

As of Sunday at 10 p.m. EDT, the website was still up, but posters were anticipating the imminent end.

"It's over," one post with 127 replies read. "The end," read another.

Cloudflare, a web infrastructure company, provides security and other services to websites to help keep them online. But the company has come under intensive heat from extremism experts over the past several months for continuing to host 8chan, even as it has become a hotbed for white nationalist, sexist, anti-Semitic, homophobic and otherwise hateful rhetoric.

Prince in his post predicted that another service would take up the mantle and 8chan would be back online soon.

"While removing 8chan from our network takes heat off of us, it does nothing to address why hateful sites fester online," he wrote. "In taking this action we've solved our own problem, but we haven't solved the Internet's."

Two years ago, Cloudflare decided to terminate service for The Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi publication that is still running today thanks to a different infrastructure provider.

"Almost exactly two years ago we made the determination to kick another disgusting site off Cloudflare's network: the Daily Stormer," Prince wrote. "That caused a brief interruption in the site's operations but they quickly came back online using a Cloudflare competitor."



8chan's Twitter account, shortly after Cloudflare's decision, vowed to find a solution within the next few days. "There might be some downtime in the next 24-48 hours while we find a solution (that includes our email so timely compliance with law enforcement requests may be affected)," 8chan tweeted.

Cloudflare's decision to cut 8chan's service is a surprising reversal from Prince, who spent the day telling reporters he believed it was necessary to keep 8chan online in order to aid law enforcement in their investigations of domestic terrorism.

Cloudflare has tended to insist it is a neutral service provider and does not make decisions about speech.

But Prince noted 8chan has proven itself "to be lawless and that lawlessness has caused multiple tragic deaths."

"Even if 8chan may not have violated the letter of the law in refusing to moderate their hate-filled community, they have created an environment that revels in violating its spirit," he wrote.