Well if you are like me and probably don’t use Google+ anymore this news may come as no real surprise to you. Yes that’s right Google’s social media flagship platform Google+ will be shutting it’s doors for all consumer (personal) accounts come 2nd April 2019. No this is no April Fools Day hangover, The search engine giant stated that they will be “sunsetting the consumer version of Google+” (sunsetting….gotta love it!) “due to low usage and the challenges involved in maintaining a successful product that meets consumers’ expectations.”
What happened, why the shutdown?
Back in November 2018, Google found after a software update, that it contained a bug affecting a Google+ API. With the discovery of this new bug, they have decided to expedite the shut-down of all Google+ APIs after this bug impacted approximately 52.5 million users, with their data being exposed.
Google claims that ‘the bug did not give developers access to information such as financial data, national identification numbers, passwords, or similar data typically used for fraud or identity theft.’
So what does this mean to you?
If you are one of the 2.2 billion users currently registered on the platform then it’s time to act now. Google+ accounts and any Google+ pages that you’ve created will be shut down and they will begin deleting content from consumer Google+ accounts.
Google will be allowing all consumers to download their content prior to shutdown, but don’t sleep on this, I suggest you act fast.
You can download and save your content and just make sure that you do this before April, as you can see by the image below when attempting a data dump of your content, that archives may take a long time (hours or possibly days) to create. You will receive an email when your archive is complete.
Please note that archives may take a long time (hours or possibly days) to create.
