Google Expedites Closure of Google+ After Bug Investigation



Google announced that it will expedite the closure of Google+ for consumers. In October of this year, Google said it would shut down Google+ for consumers “over a ten month period”.

That timeframe has been shortened to “within the next 90 days”. This decision comes after the discovery of a new bug that impacted approximately 52.5 million users in connection with a Google+ app.

We’ve recently determined that some users were impacted by a software update introduced in November that contained a bug affecting a Google+ API. We discovered this bug as part of our standard and ongoing testing procedures and fixed it within a week of it being introduced. No third party compromised our systems, and we have no evidence that the app developers that inadvertently had this access for six days were aware of it or misused it in any way.

As a result of discovering this bug, Google has decided to shut-down all Google+ APIs within the next 90 days. Google is also going to accelerate the sunset of consumer Google+ from August 2019 to April 2019.

Google says it wants to give users ample opportunity to transition off consumer Google+. It will also provide users with ways they can safely and securely download and migrate their data.

In addition, Google is in the process of notifying any enterprise customers that were impacted by the bug. That notification will come by email to those affected.

In my opinion, Google enterprise customers should take a minute and consider how much they trust Google to keep Google+ secure. This isn’t the first time this year that Google+ has had a data breach.