Yahoo kills off its Messenger service
After July 17, users can only access their saved files
Another one bites the dust.
At the ripe old age of 20, Yahoo Messenger is headed for the proverbial pine box, as Yahoo said Friday that Messenger will cease working on July 17. Yahoo, which Verizon acquired last year and folded into a new holding group called Oath, gave no precise reasons for sending Yahoo Messenger to the
grave.
But the writing was on the wall after Oath shut down another of its oldschool messaging services, AOL Instant Messenger, last fall.
“As the communications landscape continues to change over, we’re focusing on building and introducing new, exciting communications tools that better fit consumer needs,” Yahoo said in a statement announcing Messenger’s wind-down.
After July 17, Yahoo Messenger users will no longer be able to send or receive messages with the app desktop program. However, you will have six months to download and save any of your old Yahoo Messenger chat histories before those are lost forever.
According to Oath’s brand-information site, Yahoo Messenger had a “peak user reach” of 122.6 million users. However, with the rise of services such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and even the messaging apps that
are built into cellphones, Yahoo Messenger’s popularity
declined.
Now, Yahoo is directing people to look into using Squirrel, an invitation-only group chat app that is currently in beta testing.
So if you want to step
back in time a bit, back to when the telegram was still around and the iPhone was still almost a decade away, slide on over to Ya- hoo Messenger for the next month. And while you’re at it, you can also pretend Yahoo still has a chance to wipe away that pesky little Google thing, too.