By MB Online
Yahoo announced that it will be shutting down Yahoo Messenger beginning July 17.
(Yahoo Messenger Icon)
The announcement was made via a statement published in Yahoo’s support section.
Starting on the date, the e-mail services company said that “it will cease to operate all functionalities of its messenger services and any app will not work beginning July 17th.|”
There was no specific reason given but many speculate that the decision was largely influenced by the success of competing messenger apps like Facebook Messenger, Viber, and Twitter.
Users of the said app who still want such services from Yahoo were advised to sign up to their Squirrel app which is still currently in beta.
Also, those who still want to retrieve their chat history from Yahoo Messenger may proceed to their downloader request site, sign in and get verified, then download their files.
The company assured users that despite the shutdown in their messenger services, users can still use their ID for the other services.
Yahoo Messenger initially started as Yahoo! Pager and was launched in March 1998 and was even one of the more popular messaging apps in the Philippines in the early 2000s.
However, with the emergence of other messenger services interest in the said app waned.