Another data breach causes earlier shutdown of Google+

Google was already shutting down its social media platform Google+, however, with yet another massive data breach, the site will shut down four months earlier than the set date.

Back in October, Google notified about a massive data breach that exposed personal data of thousands of Google+ users. The breach led to Google deciding to shut down Google+ for consumers by next year. However, Google+ once again came under attack of a data breach due to which the tech giant will shut down Google+ four months earlier.

Google spotted a security issue that exposed data of some 52.5 million Google+ users to developers using the Google+ API. The data included names, email addresses, gender, birthday, occupation, age, relationship status even if their profiles were not public.

Google shutting down Google+ after massive data breach

As a good side, Google informed that the bug did not give developers access to information like financial data, passwords, national identification numbers, ‘or similar data typically used for fraud or identity theft’.

The data breach forced the company to shut down the service in April, four months earlier than previously planned in August. Also, its AP will cease functioning within the next 90 days. “With the discovery of this new bug, we have decided to expedite the shut-down of all Google+ APIs; this will occur within the next 90 days,” Google wrote in its blog post.

“In addition, we have also decided to accelerate the sunsetting of consumer Google+ from August 2019 to April 2019. While we recognize there are implications for developers, we want to ensure the protection of our users.”

However, Google claimed that despite the attack on millions of users, there was no evidence of the data being misused. Also, it has started notifying consumer users and enterprise customers that were impacted by the bug. Meanwhile, Google will continue operating Google+ as an enterprise product for companies that subscribe to its G Suite services.