Ofcom issues first £24m Online Safety Act fine to messaging app over illegal content failures

Ofcom has fined a messaging app £24m for failing to remove illegal content, the first penalty imposed under the Online Safety Act since the regulator’s enforcement powers came fully into force in 2025, and said it would seek a court order blocking the service in the UK if the company does not comply within three months.

Pulsar, a Singapore-registered app with about 9 million users in the UK, mostly under 25, was found to have taken an average of 11 days to act on user reports of child sexual abuse material and 26 days on reports of content encouraging self-harm, against a requirement in Ofcom’s codes to act “swiftly”. The company employed no moderators in the UK and its automated detection systems had not been updated since 2023.

The regulator’s investigation, launched in February after referrals from the Internet Watch Foundation and the National Crime Agency, found that Pulsar’s risk assessment, which all services are required to carry out under the act, ran to four pages and had been drafted by a marketing executive. Ofcom said the company had “repeatedly failed to engage” with its requests for information and had provided data that was later shown to be inaccurate.

“This is not a company that tried and fell short,” said Ofcom’s director of online safety enforcement, Grace Kettering. “This is a company that had the information, had the resources, and chose not to act, while children were being harmed on its service. The fine is set at a level that reflects that.”

The penalty equates to about 7% of Pulsar’s estimated global revenue; the act allows fines of up to 10% or £18m, whichever is greater. The company has 28 days to appeal to the Upper Tribunal. In a statement it said it was “reviewing the decision” and had “made significant investments in trust and safety this year”.

Child protection charities welcomed the decision but said it had taken too long. The NSPCC pointed out that the act received royal assent in October 2023 and that the regulator had received more than 3,000 complaints about Pulsar in that time. “The first fine in three years is a milestone,” said its head of online safety policy, Jonathan Haworth. “It should have been the tenth.”

Ofcom has 19 further investigations open, including into two much larger social media platforms over their handling of content promoting eating disorders and a file-sharing service over terrorist material. The regulator declined to say when those would conclude.

Free speech campaigners said the Pulsar case was the kind of clear-cut enforcement the act was designed for but warned that the open investigations into larger platforms would be a harder test. “Nobody will defend an app that leaves abuse images up for 11 days,” said Harriet Lund of the Open Rights Group. “The question is what Ofcom does when the content is lawful but awful, and this decision tells us nothing about that.”