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Omegle, a free online service that allowed users to talk to total strangers, has shut down.
“Operating Omegle is no longer sustainable, financially nor psychologically,” wrote its founder, Leif Brooks, who operated the company for a time out of Portland, in a statement posted on the shuttered website.
The 14-year-old website exploded in popularity during the pandemic, garnering a reported 60 million-plus monthly users, as people looked for social connection online during lockdowns. But with that popularity came allegations that the website facilitated child abuse.
Investigators hired by the United Nations Human Rights Council spent a day on the platform, and were matched with “dozens” of children, some as young as 7 or 8, according to a report filed in 2021. During that period, they were also shown pornography advertisements and matched with masturbating men.
The company was founded by a high schooler, Leif Brooks, in Brattleboro, Vt., but was officially registered while Brooks lived in Portland in 2013. So Oregon courts are handling some of Omegle’s lawsuits.
One of the most recent, filed in September in Multnomah County Circuit Court, alleges a preteen girl was groomed by multiple men using the chat service. One of the men was eventually arrested in a sting operation by police. The lawsuit demanded $22 million in damages and has since been moved to federal court.
Online services like Omegle are typically not held liable for the content posted by their users. But last year, Portland federal judge Michael W. Mosman said Omegle had stepped over the line. “Omegle could have satisfied its alleged obligation,” Mosman wrote, “by designing its product differently—for example, by designing a product so that it did not match minors and adults.”
Brooks, who now operates the company from Florida, defended his efforts to keep predators off the service in the statement posted online.
“Omegle is the direct target of these attacks, but their ultimate victim is you: all of you out there who have used, or would have used, Omegle to improve your lives, and the lives of others. When they say Omegle shouldn’t exist, they are really saying that you shouldn’t be allowed to use it; that you shouldn’t be allowed to meet random new people online,” he wrote.