As of Monday, 8chan was down due to a complete disconnection of its host Epik's services from the netblock it leased from its upstream provider, Voxility. The disconnection took notorious white nationalist site The Daily Stormer—and any other Epik customers hosted at Voxility—down with it.

Today, 8chan and The Daily Stormer are both back up. The Daily Stormer is up on its original Epik/Voxility netblock, while 8chan has popped up on a netblock owned by Reno, Nevada-based N.T. Technology.

We first discovered that 8chan was back online after testing its deep Web site, using the Tor browser. The site appeared to be offline entirely, and there's little in the way of diagnostic tools available for the Tor network—but after leaving a window open and unresponsive for over 12 minutes, the site loaded. Hovering over links within the .onion site showed they were targeted to a non-deep-Web 8chan subdomain—and to our surprise, those links loaded. This led us to re-examine both the site's DNS and overall hosting status.

Yesterday, Epik formally announced that it has "elected to not provide content delivery services to 8Chan. This is largely due to the concern of inadequate enforcement and the elevated possibility of violent radicalization on the platform." The devil is in the details, however—although it's true that Epik no longer appears to be involved in content hosting for 8chan, it has brought the controversial site's DNS services in-house to Epik's own nameservers—which themselves are hosted at Amazon Web Services, Linode, and OVH.

Jim Salter

Jim Salter

Jim Salter

Jim Salter



Ars has reached out to Amazon, Linode, OVH, and Voxility for comment. As of press time, we have no response from Amazon, Linode, or OVH yet; Voxility's CEO responded, "I am looking into this now, Voxility shouldnt be involved in this." We will update with any further response as this story develops.

Update: We have received responses from Amazon, Linode, and Voxility.

The IPs these websites are using have no link with Voxility whatsoever. I think... the IPs are owned by the hoster and now are routed by someone else. We double checked. Silviu Sirbu, Voxility CEO

8chan's content is hate speech and is unacceptable according to our Acceptable Use Policy. Although 8chan is not hosted on AWS, we are working with their direct provider (Epik) to ensure that 8chan is not indirectly using AWS resources through any of our customers. Amazon spokesperson

Linode has provided 72 hour notification to Epik that we will no longer provide platform services to the company. Linode corporate statement

An OVH spokesperson said that OVH "does not comment on alleged customers," but that an investigation is underway and a statement is being drafted.