Google stopped the creation of new accounts a couple months ago in February, and have now started the process of deleting user content today.

“On 2 April, your Google+ account and any Google+ pages that you’ve created will be shut down and we will begin deleting content from consumer Google+ accounts. Photos and videos from Google+ in your album archive and on your Google+ pages will also be deleted. You can download and save your content. Just make sure that you do this before April. Please note that photos and videos backed up in Google Photos will not be deleted.”, the company said in a notice in late January.

According to Google, it will take a couple of months to delete all the Google+ content, meaning users may still be able to access it during this time. Google+ sign-in will stop working for other services, but you’ll be able to sign into them using your Google Account.

One of the main reasons that Google+ will be shut down can be linked to a bug that exposed the personal data of nearly half a million users. This event happened on March 2018, however shortly after that, it was discovered that another security bug exposed personal data of more than 50 million users.

The most concerning part about this information was the fact that Google did not disclose the news for a number of months, which left a large number of profiles vulnerable.

Another reason for shutting down Google+ is due to the low number of users on the social media platform. When it launched in 2011, people across the internet were already using Facebook and Twitter as their main social media platforms, both receiving a surge in the number of users. This meant that Google+ already has hefty competition when it comes to attracting users to their platform and the social network itself was dead by 2015.

With this shutdown, it might take time before Google attempts to create another social media platform, as they are busy with other services, such as Google Project Stream, and developing their AI technology. Google+ remains as another Google project that did not take off and joins a list of services that the company has shut down

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“The consumer version of Google+ currently has low usage and engagement: 90 percent of Google+ user sessions are less than five seconds,” said Google, which is headquartered in Mountain View in northern California, Xinhua reported.

On Monday it was announced Google to close Google+ in the coming months, seven years after it was launched as a social networking site of its own name brand.

The demise and subsequent closure of Google+ also came as a result of a bug discovered last year but acknowledged for the first time by Google on Monday, and the flaw in one of its Google+ “People APIs” exposed some private user data to third-party developers, including such information as the occupations, genders, ages, and email addresses of many users.

“We discovered and immediately patched this bug in March 2018,” Google said, but the flaw, which has existed since 2015, could potentially affected up to 500,000 Google+ accounts.

“Our analysis showed that up to 438 applications may have used this API,” Google said. However, “We found no evidence that any developer was aware of this bug, or abusing the API, and we found no evidence that any Profile data was misused.”

The Google+ vulnerability was discovered at a time that almost coincided with the notorious privacy leakage scandal of the world’s largest social media network Facebook, which has been widely criticized for its failure to protect its users’ private data.

Facebook has been under heavy scrutiny about its privacy policy after a British data mining firm Cambridge Analytica was accused of illegally accessing the data of 87 million Facebook users without their knowledge.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was summoned to a hearing in US Congress in April this year to explain the firm’s security measures and how it handled users’ privacy.

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