Google Is Shutting Google Plus Four Months Early, After 5.3 Crore User's Data Leak

Earlier in October, Google announced it would be shutting down its social network, Google+.

Though they said it was partly because they'd had abysmal user numbers, the major reason was a massive security breach affecting 500,000 users. And now, there's been another.

The doomed social media platform was supposed to go offline in August next year, but that deadline has now been moved up to April instead thanks to the new data leak. API access to Google+ will close much before that, within the next 90 days.

According to Google, at least 52.5 million users could be affected by the newest system breach. They could have had a variety of personal information exposed to developers, including their name, email address, age, and occupation, even if their profiles were private. In addition, profile data that wasn't available publicly but was shared with even one user could have been available to third-party apps.

This is after the company admitted that the last Google+ security vulnerability exposed private user data to developers for three whole years. And though that was discovered in March, it wasn't disclosed until it was revealed in a piece by the Washington Post in October. Thankfully, this second leak was only around for about six days before Google discovered it and plugged the hole, between November 7 to November 13.

"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," the blog post reads. "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."

Google says they discovered the flaw themselves, and there's no word any developers used it or were even aware of it in those six days. However, it's impossible to be sure either way. The company says it's already informing enterprise customers, for whom Google+ will remain active under the G Suit service.