After almost a decade of struggles, the day of the Google Plus shutdown has finally arrived. Google Plus is the search engine giant’s social media platform that originally debuted in the early 2010s in an attempt to compete with Facebook. While the website had some early success, it ultimately failed to gain much of a following beyond a relatively small community of tech enthusiasts. Google is now officially tapping out and shutting down one of their biggest social media projects effective today.
The Google Plus shutdown was first announced back in December of last year. The last few months have seen the site’s frontpage changed to a message explaining that the service was being shut down and assuring users that other products would remain unaffected. A bug had affected the service’s API and it became such a matter of concern that the company elected to ramp up efforts to shut down the consumer side of operations for their social media platform.
While the public face of Google Plus is officially gone, the service will still remain in action (in a sense) as a private application geared towards businesses. Although consumer adoption has been lackluster, a number of companies have made use of Google Plus for their own internal communications networks. These private versions of Google Plus will remain unaffected by the shutdown of the public side of the service. Ostensibly, Google will continue to develop this version of their service, although the developers will probably do it with a little less gusto than something intended for the public.
Google has stated that it will likely take some time for the company to delete all of the content from such a massive endeavor. On the off chance that you made use of the site, you may still be able to download your saved data before the Google Plus shutdown has cleared everything out. For now, the days of Google Plus are officially over.
