Cloudflare has had enough, cutting off 8chan

Enlarge / Matthew Prince, co-founder and chief executive officer of CloudFlare Inc. (credit: Bloomberg/Getty Images)

In the wake of Saturday's mass shooting in El Paso, in which 20 people lost their lives, it was discovered that the shooter had posted a racist manifesto on the imageboard site 8chan. That was the third time this year alone that a mass shooting has involved the notorious site, and network operator Cloudflare decided that was finally enough. As of midnight on the US West Coast, Cloudflare will cut off 8chan.

This isn't the first time that the popular service provider has severed its ties to one of its customers over offensive content. In 2017, the company dropped the white supremacist website the Daily Stormer. The Daily Stormer was able to get back online after a brief outage by switching to another service.

Matthew Prince, the company's co-founder and CEO, has always spoken with apprehension about whether to stop providing network services to specific websites. He called his own company's decision regarding the Daily Stormer "arbitrary" and "dangerous," and intended that this would be the last action of the sort Cloudflare would take. Earlier on Sunday, CNN reported that the company had no intention of acting against 8chan.

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