It is 'not safe' for children to go online, the head of the National Crime Agency has warned.
Graeme Biggar issued a stark message to parents amid rocketing reports of child abuse on social media and gaming platforms.
The head of Britain's FBI has spoken out as terrifying figures reveal up to 900 cases of suspected child sexual exploitation are flagged every day.
In a damning indictment, Mr Biggar said the country had 'already failed two generations of teenagers', adding 'enough is enough'.
His investigators are receiving an average of 400 reports a day regarding the abuse of British children – a fourfold increase in just seven years.
While the majority of threats come from adults, some of the pictures and videos will be posted by fellow teenagers who the victims may consider their friends.
As millions of parents are considering whether to buy their children smartphones ahead of the school year starting next month, the crime agency boss said he wanted to send a message to families.
Mr Biggar said: 'We would prefer children to be able to participate online safely and reap the benefits it provides. At the moment, they cannot. The online environment in its current form is not safe for children.
Graeme Biggar, head of the National Crime Agency, has warned that the online world is not safe for children
Around 75 suspected child abuse images are posted to Instagram each day
'Enough is enough. We have already failed two generations of teenagers by abandoning them to the dangers of social media without any form of safety net. The longer we wait, the slower we go, the more children we fail.'
The reports include instances of child pornography and predators enticing children to carry out sexual acts or sending them obscene material. Other material flagged includes suspected sexual molestation and child sexual trafficking.
The breakdown of suspected abuse includes around 75 child abuse images on Instagram and 100 on Snapchat daily.
There has also been a surge in child abuse material on computer game platforms, popular with children.
The NCA receives around 25 child abuse reports a day from Roblox, an online platform where users can play games and create their own games but also has chat features.
Discord, an instant messaging platform designed for gaming, reports around 50 suspicious incidents a day.
In addition, Google and X are each reporting an average of 25 images posted a day where a British child may have been harmed.
Mr Biggar has released the alarming breakdown of child abuse reports for the first time because he believes it should represent a turning point.
Investigators are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of reports, with the figure rocketing to 900 a day on some occasions. In comparison, there were an average of 840 reports a week in 2022.
The true scale of abuse is likely to be even higher as these incidents are only those detected by the tech companies themselves.
On some social media platforms which have implemented end-to-end encryption, tech giants have 'blinded' themselves to the scale of the problem as they can no longer view users' messages, Mr Biggar said.
He believes that Facebook is putting lives in danger after its decision to encrypt messages led to a 50 per cent drop in child sexual abuse being reported on its platform.
He added: 'We assess there are between 710,000 and 840,000 adults in the UK who pose some degree of sexual risk to children.
'Last year we received 92,000 reports of potential child abuse activity online from tech companies – a fourfold increase in the last seven years.
'And it continues to grow. Last month we received over 12,000. That is over 400 a day. Every day.
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'And the referrals we are receiving are not only increasing in number but also in severity; they involve younger and younger children, and we are increasingly seeing children offending as well as being victims.
'These are big numbers, but behind each one is an individual child, for whom this abuse can be life-changing.'
Social media firms report abuse detected on their systems to a global crime reporting system based in the US, the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children, which passes on information about British victims to the NCA.
After analysing the intelligence, the NCA identifies high-risk and urgent cases, aiming to get the information to local police within a day.
Last year the NCA and police arrested 1,000 offenders and safeguarded 1,200 children each month.
Mr Biggar's warning comes as Meta faces a landmark US trial brought by 29 states alleging that Facebook and Instagram were designed to be addictive to children and that the company collected minors' data unlawfully.
The NCA director-general told the Daily Mail: 'We need to call out the scale of the problem here.
'We need to be collectively horrified by it and we need as a society to address it. We will absolutely do our part in law enforcement, but we have to raise the alarm on the scale of this happening.'
A Meta spokesman said: 'In 2025, we removed over 36million pieces of child sexual exploitation content from Facebook and Instagram, over 94 per cent of which we found proactively before it was reported to us.'
Discord said: 'Our safety systems combine advanced technology and human-led investigations, alongside user reports to help identify accounts or spaces engaged in harmful activity.'