Google+ has never been the most popular social media platform, but soon it’s going to be gone for good. What made Google decide to shutter the platform?

Google revealed that they recently discovered a security breach, which compromised users’ private profile information:

While our engineering teams have put a lot of effort and dedication into building Google+ over the years, it has not achieved broad consumer or developer adoption, and has seen limited user interaction with apps. The consumer version of Google+ currently has low usage and engagement: 90 percent of Google+ user sessions are less than five seconds…

 Given these challenges and the very low usage of the consumer version of Google+, we decided to sunset the consumer version of Google+.

 To give people a full opportunity to transition, we will implement this wind-down over a 10-month period, slated for completion by the end of next August. Over the coming months, we will provide consumers with additional information, including ways they can download and migrate their data.

Users will permanently lose access to their data at the end of August 2019. Although Google is shutting down the consumer version of Google+, they stated that Google+ will remain open for enterprise customers (i.e. those who use Google+ within their business.)