Message board 8chan, where it is believed the El Paso suspect posted his manifesto before carrying out a mass shooting at the weekend, briefly resurfaced online – only to be swiftly taken down again.

The site originally went offline after Cloudflare, a San Francisco-based company that offers websites extra protection from cyberattacks, withdrew its protection of 8chan. The move was prompted by the revelation that the El Paso shooter suspect has used the site to share a racist rant.

Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare wrote in a blog post: “Based on evidence we’ve seen, it appears that he [the shooting suspect] posted a screed to the site immediately before beginning his terrifying attack on the El Paso Walmart killing 20 people.

“Unfortunately, this is not an isolated incident. Nearly the same thing happened on 8chan before the terror attack in Christchurch, New Zealand.”

“They have proven themselves to be lawless and that lawlessness has caused multiple tragic deaths,” Prince wrote. “Even if 8chan may not have violated the letter of the law in refusing to moderate their hate-filled community, they have created an environment that revels in violating its spirit.”

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However, Prince warned that this decision would only disrupt 8chan temporarily, as it would probably take up service with one of Cloudflare’s competitors. This same scenario occurred when Cloudflare stopped protecting the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazis site in 2017.

“That competitor at the time promoted as a feature the fact that they didn’t respond to legal process,” Prince said. “I have little doubt we’ll see the same happen with 8chan. While removing 8chan from our network takes heat off of us, it does nothing to address why hateful sites fester online.

“It does nothing to address why mass shootings occur. It does nothing to address why portions of the population feel so disenchanted they turn to hate. In taking this action we’ve solved our own problem, but we haven’t solved the internet’s,” he added.

8chan was created by Fredrick Brennan as an alternative to 4chan, a site popular with gamers, however, he gave up its ownership in 2015 and has since called for it to be taken down.

Welcoming Clourflare’s decision, he wrote on Twitter: “Thank you so much @CloudFlare Finally this nightmare might have an end.”

As Prince predicted, the site moved to Epik, the provider that took over the Daily Stormer, however, Epik is heavily dependent on the infrastructure provider Volxility, which quickly severed ties with the company upon learning of 8chan’s move thus taking it offline again.

Alex Stamos, former chief security officer at Facebook and professor at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation told The Guardian, “We will see if they find someone else willing to host them before they get kicked off again,” he said.

“In the long run, there are a number of web hosts in Russia that charge a lot of money to host content that nobody else wants to host – that means 8chan would ultimately be much slower and much less effective.”