Google Plus to shut down accounts on April 2

Google will reportedly shut down its Google Plus service in early April, closing all accounts and pages on the platform once hailed as the company’s answer to Facebook.

The Mercury News reports that the service will shut down on April 2, six months after the company announced that it would expedite its closure of Google Plus due to a security vulnerability that affected 52.5 million users.

{mosads} Google did not immediately return a request for comment from The Hill.

Google Plus was initially slated to be shut down in August 2019, but Google announced in October that a vulnerability affecting millions of accounts had affected its decision to move up the date.

“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,” Google’s vice president of product management David Thacker wrote of the software bug last year.

The bug, which allowed third-party app designers access to some personal information on Google Plus users’ profiles without their consent, was reportedly hidden by the company in order to avoid scrutiny from financial regulators, The Wall Street Journal reported at the time.

Google’s discovery of the flaw came at the same time as rival Facebook faced widespread public backlash over its disclsoure that Cambridge Analytica had received personal information about millions of users without their knowledge or consent.