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Google Plus shutdown means key Google moments are being lost to the ether

The platform is vanishing and some significant milestones in Google history are going with it.

Daniel Van Boom Senior Writer
Daniel Van Boom is an award-winning Senior Writer based in Sydney, Australia. Daniel Van Boom covers cryptocurrency, NFTs, culture and global issues. When not writing, Daniel Van Boom practices Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, reads as much as he can, and speaks about himself in the third person.
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Google Plus is being torn down, and some of the first pages to go are those of key executives.

On Tuesday the profiles of current CEO Sundar Pichai , former CEO Eric Schmidt  and Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page were all deleted from the platform, reports Business Insider

Some Google Plus posts, including a post by Page explaining Google's take on the National Security Agency's controversial 2013 PRISM program, were archived at the time in Google's blog. But the removal of these executive pages means several other posts significant to the company's history have been lost to the internet ether. 

Business Insider notes that such posts include announcements of important new hires as well as more personal stories, like one from Page on his history with vocal chord issues and how this affected his life -- and work.

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It comes just days after several Mark Zuckerberg posts from over a decade ago were discovered, also by Business Insider, to have been deleted from Facebook's platform. This, a Facebook spokesperson said, was due to "technical errors."

Unlike Zuckerberg's enigmatic posts, though, the purging of Google+ has been a long time coming. Last year, the search giant said it would shut down Google Plus after it found (and fixed) a security flaw that may have exposed the personal data of 500,000 users. Tuesday was just the beginning of the torn pages to come.

People have been mourning the loss of Google Plus all day. Kind of