Short answers, pulled from the story.
4chan was created by Christopher Poole, who used the online handle "moot". He launched the site on the 1st of October 2003, when he was a 15-year-old student from New York City. Poole built the site using the open source code of the Japanese imageboard Futaba Channel, translating it into English with AltaVista's Babel Fish translator.
4chan has no registration system by design, so any user who leaves the Name field blank is attributed to "Anonymous". Poole explained at the Paraflows Symposium in Vienna in 2009 that the site's culture stemmed from two factors: the anonymous system and the absence of data retention, summarizing this as "The site has no memory."
Hiroyuki Nishimura purchased 4chan from Poole on the 21st of September 2015, after Poole stepped down as administrator on the 21st of January 2015. Nishimura was previously the administrator of 2channel between 1999 and 2014. Reports suggested that Japanese companies including toy manufacturer Good Smile Company may have helped finance the purchase and received partial ownership in return.
4chan is credited with popularizing lolcats, Rickrolling, rage comics, Pepe the Frog, and wojaks, among many others. Rickrolling grew from a 2005 word filter that changed "egg" to "duck", which evolved into a bait-and-switch linking to Rick Astley's 1987 song "Never Gonna Give You Up". The SCP Foundation also originated on 4chan's /x/ board in 2007.
/mu/ is 4chan's music board, credited by publications including Pitchfork and Entertainment Weekly with helping popularize artists such as Death Grips, Neutral Milk Hotel, Car Seat Headrest, and Have a Nice Life. Music critic Anthony Fantano began his career on /mu/. The board has also been recognized for recovering rare and lost recordings, including works by Duster and Godspeed You! Black Emperor.
On the 14th of April 2025, an anonymous user hacked 4chan and announced the breach on soyjak.party. Source code and user login credentials were apparently acquired and leaked. The site was taken offline and returned on the 25th of April 2025, after Nishimura confirmed work was underway to fix security vulnerabilities.
On the 19th of March 2026, Ofcom fined 4chan £450,000 for failing to implement age checks under the Online Safety Act 2023, £20,000 for not specifying how users are protected from illegal content, and £50,000 for not carrying out an illegal content risk assessment. Ofcom set a deadline of the 2nd of April 2026 for 4chan to remedy the breaches, after which daily fines of £900 per breach would apply.