Engineering Best Practices

Tech Debt Took Down 4chan (Not Hackers)

Susanne Abdelrahman

Susanne Abdelrahman

— 2 min read
A neon sign on a dark wall that says “Dance like no one’s watching.” The words "dance like" are barely glowing. The rest glows softly in red, casting a faint light.

What the site-killing hack reveals about maintenance neglect, quality culture, and the failures that build up when no one’s watching.

I’ve been thinking about the 4chan hack since it happened. Now, I don’t generally keep up with that corner of the internet or care much about what happens there. But this one caught my attention - not because of who it happened to, but how.

If anyone had cared to look closely enough, this very likely wouldn’t have happened. The site ran on aging, unpatched software. Tooling was outdated. There was no meaningful observability or alerting.

Too often, quality work, tech debt, and maintenance are treated as optional. The stuff you get to if you have extra time, if leadership cares, or if something breaks loudly enough.

For 4chan, eventually, it broke loud enough 😬

Culture mirrors code

It’s so interesting to me the way that 4chan’s external culture of anonymity and disposability was reflected in their internal one. No real ownership. No responsibility. No investment in resilience or repair. No care for their users.

It’s interesting, but not surprising i guess, that a site designed to avoid accountability ends up with systems no one is accountable for.

Nothing new here

It’s tempting to treat hacks that make the news like outliers, and sometimes they are! But not in this case. If you’ve worked in tech long enough, you know this isn’t unusual - just extreme and public.

How many teams have you worked with that:

  • Postpone upgrades until they’re absolutely forced to?
  • Don’t know who owns their oldest services?
  • Skip logging or alerting to "go faster?", leaving them as (not-so) fast-follows?

This isn’t a 4chan problem. It’s a tech industry pattern.

Don’t end up like 4chan

Have a plan for the stuff nobody owns. If it runs in prod, you really should know how it works and what to do when it breaks.

Make time for boring problems. Those stable systems that aren’t on flashy dashboards? Those are often the ones that cause the loudest outages.

Don’t wait for a crisis to make your decisions for you. Your backlog of quality and maintenance work is much easier to deal with before a crisis hits.

Not all hacks are cinematic or complicated. Some are just the slow, silent result of neglect.

In the end, 4chan didn’t get taken down by enemies. They got taken down by themselves.

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