- Google+ will be shut down for good on 2 April, with all profiles and pages to be deleted on that day.
- The deletion does not affect other Google services. Photos and videos stored in Google Photos, will not be affected. Your Google account, which is linked to services such as Gmail, YouTube and Maps, will continue to work, but your Google+ account, which was only used for the social network, will be deleted.
Why is Google doing this?
The company’s official explanation is that it decided to shutter the site “due to low usage and challenges involved in maintaining a successful product that meets consumers’ expectations”.
Perhaps those “challenges” largely relate to a data leak in the social network that it discovered in March 2018 but did not disclose for six months.
That leak “potentially affected up to 500,000 accounts”, allowing third-party applications to access information marked as private, although Google said it had found “no evidence that any profile data was misused”.
The company had initially planned to shut the social network down in August this year, but in November it discovered another bug that gave apps access to non-public information, and brought forward the shutdown to April.
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