Legendary 18-year-old Yahoo Messenger to shut down on August 5, 2016

Yahoo has signaled the closure of the legacy Yahoo Messenger through their blog post stating that the legendary messenger would not take any services from August 5, 2016.

Yahoo Messenger has been struggling, making its place for more than 18 years. Launched with the name of ‘Yahoo Pager’ in 1998, this Messenger remained a top-notch platform for communication in past times as it was accompanied by fewer competitors. But as the time progressed, new modes of communications were accompanied by new communication platforms.

Yahoo was able to bring out an upgraded product, a new “Yahoo Messenger”, modeled on high-tech lanes last year. The brought-out will now act as a replacement for the legendary Yahoo Messenger, we have been seeing around for about two decades. The replacement has been officiated through one of the blog post, in which Yahoo explained,

“While today we provide basic inter-operation between the legacy product and the new Messenger, we encourage all of our users to complete their transition to the new Yahoo Messenger as we will no longer support the legacy platform as of August 5, 2016.”

After August 5th, the old Yahoo Messenger would not be of any service. Other messengers built on Yahoo Messenger API, would also face the same fate after the pull-over of legacy Yahoo Messenger. The downloads of legacy Yahoo Messenger has already been discontinued on the Application Stores.

The take is one of the quite recent strategic moves by Yahoo. In February, Yahoo announced to lay off 15% of its employees. While, quite recently the tech company has also moved to kill off some digital magazines as well.

Yahoo also mentioned that it would be discontinuing Yahoo Recommends, a content discovery tool for third-party websites, on September 1, 2016.

Download the NEW Yahoo Messenger for Android | Apple.