It's easy to wax conspiratorial about 4chan's outages in spite of its long-term survival but the hard reality is the site is built off of several incredibly fucked iterations of a fork of a reverse-engineered interpretation of the back-end for an old Japanese website before they had any concept of "competent IT" or "streamlined coding" as interpreted by a 15 year old nerd who liked jerking off to tentacle porn. Then add on the fact 4chan is almost 20 years old and develops some kind of controversy every month, at
minimum on par with the shit that produces autistic vendettas comparable to Dong-Gone's hateboner for the Farms, meaning it's gonna be inundated with as many nonsensical attacks and forced technical issues purely to spite the users and the staff. And sometimes the spite isn't even out of actual malice, they just think it's funny.
It's gonna have hard crashes like this occasionally because even with better servers it's made of gum and string, we're just hearing less about it now because - again - the site's largely corporate now so you're not gonna get the same transparency as some guy working on it himself.
Doesn't help the devs and high-up mods/admins like RapeApe and Swaglord - who are among the most "communicative" of current 4chan staff - are intentionally very opaque which probably motivates the theories of conspiracy.
Edit:
It's happened before with Sarah Palin's email leaks. Moot went to court, had to explain what "newfag" is. The testimony can be seen
here.