Google+ requests consumers to save photos & videos before shutdown

Feb 01, 2019 (LBO) – American multinational technology company Google is requesting its consumers to download and save the content shared in their personal Google+ profiles as the company has decided to shut down the service for consumers by April 2019. The company said the decision was taken due to low usage and challenges involved in maintaining a successful product that meets consumers' expectations. Accordingly, Google+ integrations for web and mobile apps and Google+ APIs (Application Programming Interface) will be shut down on March 7, 2019, which includes Google+ Sign-in and OAuth token requests with Google+ scopes. Google+ team strongly encourage developers to search for and remove any dependencies on Google+ APIs from their applications. The company, however, said that this will be a progressive shutdown, with intermittent failures starting as early as January 28, 2019. “While we’re sunsetting Google+ for consumers, we’re investing in Google+ for enterprise organizations. They can expect a new look and new features,” the Google said in a blog post. “We understand that our ability to build reliable products that protect your data drives user trust.” Google recently discovered that some users have been impacted by a software update introduced in November last year that contained a bug affecting a Google+ API. With the discovery of this new bug, they decided to expedite the shut down of all Google+ APIs and decided to accelerate the sunsetting of consumer Google+ from August 2019 to April 2019.