A new online service has joined the graveyard of once-fashionable apps, networks and sites: the Omegle chat announced its closure on Thursday, November 9. Created in 2009 by an American teenager, this online service allowed, like its Russian cousin Chatroulette, strangers to make random contact and converse by video.
However, it did not experience its peak of popularity until much later, during the confinements due to the Covid-19 pandemic, among adolescents and users of the social network TikTok. Losing momentum since then, it recently accumulated 1.2 million visits every month in France, according to an estimate from SimilarWeb.
In a very long text, pinned to the home page of his site, the creator of Omegle, Leif K-Brooks, explains that “keeping Omegle running is no longer viable, neither financially nor psychologically”.
The concept of Omegle, assumed even in its slogan (Talk to strangers!, “Talk to strangers!”), has caused the site several controversies, as reported by the BBC website. It has thus been accused on several occasions of putting pedophiles in contact with minors: a young American sued the platform in 2021 for allowing a pedophile to extract images of a sexual nature from her.
In Europe, Omegle has been in the sights of child protection organizations or parents of students for several months, in a context where online platforms are required to take measures in the fight against child crime.