Breaking: Gawker Is Being Attacked by 4Chan

Our weekend editor Joe Coscarelli wrote on Saturday about Gawker writer Adrian Chen going head-to-head with a pointedly dangerous and particularly insane subset of users from message board 4Chan called /B over a smear campaign they conducted on an 11 year-old girl. “They’re petty and disgusting,” he noted, “but they get shit done.” And getting shit done (to Gawker) is apparently what they’re doing right now.

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From inside Gawker comes this memo from the blog network’s top tech brains:

On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 11:24 AM, Jeremy Chase wrote:
We are having major issues at the moment, expect problems.

From: Thomas Plunkett
Date: July 19, 2010 11:41:09 AM EDT
To: Jeremy Chase
Cc: all@gawker.com
Subject: Re: STATUS: Site problems

To clarify — there is an apparent attack planned (and underway a bit early):

http://boards.4chan.org/b/res/254339741

We are addressing the issue, and you may not experience problems.

Uh, go to that link at your own risk, because 4Chan is the craziness. I’m serious.

But yes: as Joe noted, they were planning to attack Gawker, and now they’re following through. What a fun way to start the week! More as we get it.

[fkamer@villagevoice.com]