Another Breach Forces Google+ To Be Shutdown Four Months Early

Another data breach forces Google+ to shut down by April 2019.

Google+ is being shut down by April 2019.

(Photo: The Quint)

Google has accelerated the process of shutting down one of its social networking divisions, Google+, four months earlier than scheduled due to another breach that’s affected almost 52.5 million subscribers.

In a blogpost by Google, the company stated that there were vulnerabilities with the platform that it had corrected. Yet in the best interest of the users it has decided to pull the plug on Google+ in April 2019 instead of August 2019.

Also, the API access to the network will be terminated within the next 90 days.

The vulnerability impacted users who might have had information like their names, occupation, email addresses and even age, which could have been exposed to developers, even though their account was set to private.

The breach was discovered by Google as a part of its standard testing procedure between 7 November and 13 November.

Certain applications could also access profile data that had been shared with a specific user, but was not shared publicly.

Google has started intimating users individually and also enterprise customers that were impacted by this bug. The company’s investigation is ongoing to determine whether there has been any impact on other Google+ APIs.

Google is looking to continue to offer Google+ as an enterprise product to companies which have subscribed to its G Suite services.

Back in October, Google has announced that it will be shutting down Google+ services permanently due to a breach, which has affected 500,000 users. Google called it a “software glitch” and issued a sunsetting end for the platform.

The company also cited “very low usage and engagement” on Google+ to be one of the reasons for Google terminating Google+.

The shutdown also means that all applications that use Google+ for log in and authentication will require other means to do so and access apps in the future.