Google announced last fall it’s killing off Google+ because of the social network’s laughably “low usage” and “challenges involved in maintaining a successful product that meets consumers’ expectations,” plus revelations of serious security vulnerabilities.
Google‘s support page details exactly how the G+ shutdown will go down, and it’s not just freezing posts on the site. The whole site will be taken down, and everything will be deleted. “On April 2nd, your Google+ account and any Google+ pages you created will be shut down and we will begin deleting content from consumer Google+ accounts,” the page reads.
The whole deletion process sounds brutal. It won’t just be the entire Google+ site that will be scrubbed from the Internet Google+ powered comments on Blogger and other third-party sites will all be deleted, too. In the coming weeks, Google will replace the Google+ Sign-in buttons with Google Sign-in ones, and it will also remove the Google+ comments feature from Blogger as early as Monday, February 4th. The feature will disappear from other platforms by March 7th.
For G Suite users, the Google+ social media platform will remain active and Google says that it should receive a new look and more features in the coming weeks.
Users of Google+ have until April to download and save everything themselves, which they can do via this page.
