Google Is Shutting Down Google+

Google+ was launched just over 7 years as Google’s attempt to revival Facebook, and at first seemed to be a great success after reaching 25 million active users in the first month. However, the popularity of Google+ was short lived and never posed any real threat to the social giants of the time, Facebook and Twitter.

Now 7 years later, the ill-fated social network Google+ will be shut down four months earlier than was originally planned. Google announced that this is because Google+ had suffered another data leak which impacted 52.5 million users.

The users affected could have had profile information like their name, email address, occupation, and age exposed even if their account was set to private. Apps could have also accessed profile data that had been shared with a user, but not shared publicly.

Google+ has only just had a vulnerability exposed in October 2018, which had enabled developers to see private data for as long as three years. Because of this, Google announced that they will close down the consumer version of Google+.

However, with the new bug discovered, Google has stated in their blog “With the discovery of this new bug, we have decided to expedite the shut-down of all Google+ APIs; this will occur within the next 90 days. In addition, we have also decided to accelerate the sunsetting of consumer Google+ from August 2019 to April 2019. While we recognize there are implications for developers, we want to ensure the protection of our users.”

According to Google, the bug was addressed after 6 days and users’ passwords and financial data were not impacted.

Earlier this year, a separate security bug was unveiled which supposedly went uncovered for three years and exposed the data of more than 500,000 people. This led to Google announcing that they would shut down Google+ in August 2019, however follow yet another massive embarrassment Google will now close down the consumer version of Google+ in April 2019.