3 min read
Omegle shut down in 2023. So what happened, and what is this?
You typed "Omegle" into a search bar and landed here. So now you're wondering what happened to the site you remember, and what on earth this one is.
Short answer: the original shut itself down on November 8, 2023, after a lawsuit and years of losing the fight against creeps. This site borrowed the name and the idea. It isn't the original. The long answer is below.
2009: a teenager's side project
Omegle was built by Leif K-Brooks. He was 18 and living in Brattleboro, Vermont. Version one was a text box and nothing else: two random people, labelled "You" and "Stranger", plus a button to bail.
It caught on fast. No sign-up, no profile, nothing to lose. Where else were you going to end up talking to someone you'd never meet in a hundred years?
Fourteen years of "You're now chatting with a random stranger"
Video showed up in 2010 and pretty much became the whole point. Later came interest tags, so you could find strangers into the same stuff, and spy mode, where you dropped a question on two strangers and watched them argue about it.
It never really went away, either. YouTubers built entire channels out of their chats. TikTok dragged it back into fashion, and then the pandemic sent it through the roof. By 2023 it was reportedly pulling around 70 million visits a month.
November 8, 2023: the letter
One morning the chat was just gone. In its place: a long letter from K-Brooks and a picture of a gravestone. Running Omegle, he wrote, was "no longer sustainable, financially nor psychologically". Then the line everyone quoted: "Frankly, I don't want to have a heart attack in my 30s."
No relaunch. No buyer. No farewell week. Fourteen years, done in a day.
What actually sank it
The big one was a lawsuit. In 2021 a woman sued Omegle in Oregon. When she was 11, the site had matched her with a man who went on to exploit her for years. US websites usually aren't on the hook for what their users do, but in 2022 a judge let her case go ahead on the argument that Omegle's design itself was defective. It paired kids with adults. The case was settled in November 2023, the same month the site closed.
Then there was moderation, which was basically whack-a-mole. Nudity, harassment and predators were part of Omegle's reputation for years. It did moderate. But there were no accounts, so a banned user could come back on a new IP address in minutes.
And the bills. Live video for millions of people, moderators and lawyers, all at the same time, for one small operation. Something had to give, and it did.
So is this Omegle?
Same name, same idea, because the idea was great: one click, a random stranger, Esc for the next one. But we're an independent site with no link to Omegle.com LLC or Leif K-Brooks.
What we changed is the stuff that killed the original. You have to be 18 or older. Every video goes past an AI nudity filter that can blur nudity before you see it. Chats are recorded so moderators can act on reports, and the recordings get deleted after 30 days. The privacy policy lists exactly what we keep.
Curious? Start a chat and see for yourself.
Spotting a fake "Omegle is back" site
Loads of sites are trying to cash in on the name. Be careful with any of them (us included) if they:
- want your credit card before you can say hi
- make you download an app or a browser extension first
- ask you to log in with Google, Facebook or Snapchat just to chat
- call themselves "the official Omegle, relaunched". The original isn't coming back, so that's a lie.
