Google Plus To Shut Down In April 2019

According to a recent announcement by Google, the consumer version of Google Plus platform is going to shut down in April 2019. 🙁

The reason behind this is the second bug impacted the data of around 52 million users. The API of Google Plus got severely affected by the recent November software update introduced by Google.

Also, in October a bug in the software resulted in the compromise of almost 50k accounts. It was then when the company decided to shut down the platform for good.

It was then when the company decided to shut down the platform for good. Initially, the shutdown deadline was August 2019, but because of the recent bug, it has been shifted to April 2019.

Original Bug Detected THREE Years Back! 

The original bug detected in October has been in existence since 2015, but the developers realized its presence in March 2018.

According to various reports compiled earlier, due to regulatory apprehensions, Google was skeptic about the immediate reporting of the issue. It was then that the Google made their announcement of shutting down the network altogether official.

Although the expedition of the date has taken place considering the current scenario.

According to Google, “No third party had any role in compromising our systems. Or the developers that were able to access the data were responsible for misusing it for approximately six days”.

Google also insisted that they fixed the bug within a week although they informed the users about the same recently.

However, it is confirmed that all APIs of Google Plus is going to shut down within the upcoming 90 days. The incident indicated that the API permitted an app developer to view the details of a user’s profile even which were restricted. This API allowed access to the name, occupation, email address, age, etc. of users even when the public setting was not activated.

Further, Google revealed that even the data shared by another user with the consent of the user was visible. In this case, the setting was not public. Although one of Google blogs says that no financial data, passwords, national identification numbers, or any data that could have lead to identity theft or frauds were visible. Despite the bug, the developers could not access this information.

During the initial data compromise announcement, Google said it was challenging to maintain the Google Plus products, as a majority of the sessions lasted for less than 5 seconds. The reason behind this could be the fact that all Gmail users automatically have a Google Plus account they are not aware of and don’t bother finding out.

Virtual Data Can Be Downloaded

Google is in the process of scrutinizing some other APIs and in the time to come, it is set to provide users with options for downloading all their valuable data from Google Plus.

The blog post also mentions that if enterprise users encounter any further issues, they can reach out to the system administrators as Googe is planning to continue investing in the enterprise area.

Thus, the task of sending out notifications to enterprise users and fixing their problems is one of Google’s top priorities.