Google has started erasing content Google+

Google began erasing all content from the consumer version of Google+ on Tuesday morning. With this, the search giant is officially burying its failed social network. Creating new accounts has been impossible since February 4.

Google announced in October 2018 that it would discontinue the consumer version of Google+, after a serious privacy bug came to light. The business version of Google+, part of G Suite, will remain until further notice.

Google+ was launched in June 2011, first as an invitation-only service, to compete with Facebook and Twitter. At that time, it was already Google’s fourth attempt at building a social network, but Google+ also never brought the hoped-for success.

If you have not yet exported your data on Google+, you can still do so at the time of writing via this link. A downloadable archive is then created containing, among other things, the +1’s, photos and Google+ circles of the user. If this is no longer possible at some point, the public posts and reactions may still be available thanks to the efforts of the Internet Archive, known for the Wayback Machine.