Popular live video chat website Omegle is shutting down after 14 years following user claims of abuse.
The service, which randomly placed users in online chats with strangers, grew in popularity with children and young people during the COVID-19 pandemic.
But the site has been mentioned in more than 50 cases against paedophiles in the last couple of years.
Founder Leif Brooks said that operating the website was “no longer sustainable, financially nor psychologically.”
“There can be no honest accounting of Omegle without acknowledging that some people misused it, including to commit unspeakably heinous crimes,” he said.
“As much as I wish circumstances were different, the stress and expense of this fight – coupled with the existing stress and expense of operating Omegle, and fighting its misuse – are simply too much.
“Frankly, I don’t want to have a heart attack in my 30s.”
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Mr Brooks launched Omegle in 2009 at the age of 18. He described it as “the idea of ‘meeting new people’ distilled down to almost its platonic ideal”, and built on what he saw as “the intrinsic safety benefits of the internet, users were anonymous to each other by default”.
The website had around 73 million visitors a month, according to analysts at website watchers Semrush, mostly from India, the US, the UK, Mexico, and Australia.
For some teenagers, it was seen as a rite of passage to be matched with a stranger in a live video chat where anything could happen.
However, Omegle has been the subject of controversy, including in a landmark case where a young American accused the platform of randomly pairing her with a paedophile.
The account user was a minor when the incident took place and the lawsuit against Omegle was filed 10 years later in November 2021.
Omegle’s legal team argued in court that the website was not to blame for what happened, and denied that it was a haven for predators.
Earlier this year, the BBC found that Omegle has been mentioned in dozens of cases against paedophiles in countries including the UK, US, and Australia.
Video-sharing platform TikTok banned sharing links to Omegle after a BBC investigation in 2021 found what appeared to be children exposing themselves to strangers on the website.
Imagery of young children carrying out sexual acts on camera has risen more than tenfold since the pandemic lockdowns, according to the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF).
In 2022, the IWF logged more than 63,000 web pages showing the material compared to 5,000 before the pandemic.
