Presumably this is a response to the Online Safety Act.
However it doesn’t make much sense, because Imgur no longer hosts sexually-explicit content due to pressure from advertisers, and there has been no communication from them to suggest that they have had any trouble due to of the content that people warned may get caught up in the OSA (which, while a real risk, would be a lengthy court battle)
For me this is an inevitable result of the OSA but Imgur also likely bears some responsibility. If 4chan is still available in the UK, there was no need for Imgur to go dark, at least not at this stage.
Not OSA related, it’s because of ICO’s decision to fine them for alleged violations of seperate child data protection legislation: https://ico.org.uk/about-the-ico/media-centre/news-and-blogs/2025/09/statement-update-on-imgur-investigation/
Oh, nice find!
And they are using the incorrect status code
400 Bad Requestinstead of451 Unavailable For Legal Reasons451 Unavailable For Legal Reasons
That reference to Fahrenheit 451 is 🔥
In my experience it’s usually 403 for region locking
because Imgur no longer hosts sexually-explicit content
They don’t aim to host it, but since anyone can upload anything they can’t guarantee it. So to be legally OK they have to do the whole age guard and region locking.
The puritans have managed to make strip away the first two w-s of www. Makes propaganda campaigns easier.
Anyone can upload anything to reddit, but they only prevent you from accessing 18+ communities unless you go through the ID process. To be legally OK they have to get rid of/age lock such content in good time.
It’s the same with all sites that allow user-submitted content.
So a subreddit where all posts get auto-deleted after one hour would not need age lock. Even if people use it for porn. Hmm
This is the second site that has gone dark in the UK that gets in the way of my work. I wonder if anyone is measuring the economic impact of sites becoming unavailable?
What was the other?
One of the open source git repos: https://repo.or.cz/uk-blocked.html
Curious. What kind of work requires imgur?
Full time gaslighting posting on social media.
steam games or politics
A few weeks back they went on a mass banning spree too after a mass protest from users. I ‘could’ still access it as I use a VPN and have for the last 12-13yrs… the OSA affected me for 2 seconds, as I switched from a server in one country to another… But imgur went to shit a long time ago, bowing to chinese investors and censoring shit, then being bought by a toxic company known for degrading services and running them into the ground whilst pocketing as much cash as they get their hands on.
So imgur has been dying for many years, and this is just finishing it off.
Don’t fret, there are alternatives and they’re not corpo controlled by wankers.
Make sure you read the link in the other comment - seems it’s not to do with the OSA necessarily, but due to a likely fine.
The only VPNs I have access to atm are not suitable for this kind of thing, unfortunately. Looks like I’m going to need to pay for something different.
I haven’t found anything similar to Imgur (i.e. a good mixture of shitposts and cats with a high level of community engagement). There’s plenty of room for improvement (better filtering out of US politics, ability to manage whether and to what level I am seeing hornyposting) even then.
Yeah, they think they can avoid the fine by blocking the UK… but that won;t have any effect on their past failings to follow the UK laws.
All I can say is… good, imgur can fuck off and hopefully die.
