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Twitter has announced that it is to shut down Vine.
The company acquired the six-second video sharing service in October 2012 for £24.6 milion, and has stated that it is going to gradually close the site in "the right way".
Founded by Dom Hofmann, Rus Yusupov, and Colin Kroll, Vine managed to tap into a devoted audience of over 200 million users, but with the meteoric rise of Snapchat combined with Twitter’s own financial ails, Twitter has decided to cut its losses.
In a heartfelt blog post, the teams behind Twitter and Vine stated that this will be a gradual wind-down and that "Nothing is happening to the apps, website or your Vines today".
"We’ll be keeping the website online because we think it’s important to still be able to watch all the incredible Vines that have been made You will be notified before we make any changes to the app or website."
The company however says that this is not the death of Vine and that “We’ll be sharing more details on this blog, our Twitter account, and will notify you through the app when we start to change things.”
It is widely believed that Twitter had been looking to offload Vine. This move certainly seems to leave the door open for a buyer to come in and acquire a well established social platform at a cut price.
Twitter also confirmed this week that it is to cut roughly 9 per cent of its workforce. Combined with reports that Salesforce, The Walt Disney Company and Alphabet all passed up offers to purchase the social media service, it is clear that things aren’t exactly in the best of states for Twitter right now.
