Side Effects of Imgur's UK Shutdown

Instead of complying with the UK's so-called 'Online Safety Act,' Imgur, an online image hosting service, geoblocks UK users from accessing their service entirely.

This has caused unexpected side effects for some web services.

Firstly, I've heard of some game listings on Steam failing to load images, because they are hosted on Imgur. I can imagine game developers won't be best pleased once they hear Imgur is interferring with their commercial product.

With that said, I was surprised to learn that Steam doesn't necessarily host all the storefront media on its own servers.

Personally, I've noticed that my website's ad boxes aren't working properly. These aren't paid ad boxes. They're user-created promotions for personal websites. A lot of these ads feature images hosted on Imgur. Now, instead of displaying the images as normal, Imgur simply says "Content not viewable in your region."

So the Online Safety Act is harming the web in surprising ways.

This situation highlights that we shouldn't be relying on external services like Imgur to host media for our websites. Instead of complying with overbearing 'safety' laws (somewhat understandably), they can abruptly stop service for an entire country. Depending on your audience, that can be pretty detrimental.

A much safer option would be to invest in hosting the media yourself. That way, you get control of what you host and when & where it's accessible. Otherwise, stick to a reliable paid service. Preferably one that you can easily switch from in the event of a shutdown.

I suppose the same could be said about this website. If GitHub chooses to shut down its free static hosting service, this site disappears. The good news is that this website is, by design, easily transferable, low-maintenance and cheap to run. So moving it somewhere else shouldn't be much trouble.

PS: While I was editing this, Cloudflare, a security service experienced an outage that knocked out Twitter/X, ChatGPT and other high traffic websites. So... Point proven...?