LiveLeak Shuts Down After 15 Years Of Hosting Gruesome Videos

British video-sharing website LiveLeak, best known for hosting videos of extremely graphic nature, has shut down after 15 years of service. The shutdown was announced by the website's owner and co-founder Hayden Hewitt, along with the launch of a new video-sharing project.

On Wednesday, Hewitt posted a message to LiveLeak users, clarifying some of the reasons behind the decision to pull the plug on the site and writing that it was "the right time to chart a new path." In the message, Hewitt also wrote that LiveLeak's team was switching to a new video sharing project dubbed "ItemFix."

The world has changed a lot over these last few years, the Internet alongside it, and we as people. I'm sat here now writing this with a mixture of sorrow because LL has been not just a website or business but a way of life for me and many of the guys but also genuine excitement at what's next.
I hope some of you will enjoy ItemFix and find it useful and entertaining. It's something completely different, completely fresh, and something we feel energized about tackling and whilst I know many of you will be upset, possibly angry, about our decision I do hope you also understand our reasons and appreciate that, alongside you, we have walked together through some interesting times and some crazy ones. Sometimes it's just the right time to chart a new path.

Launched in 2006, allowing videos that were much too gruesome for YouTube, LiveLeak became so associated with videos of people dying in violent ways that it spawned memes about its logo manifesting as a harbinger of one's gruesome demise. Besides videos of death and gore, LiveLeak also hosted footage of politics, war and other video content.

The shutdown of LiveLeak follows the closure of BestGore.com, another media hosting site for gruesome content that went dark in November 2020.