Google admits millions of internet links to break forever as angry users brand tech giant ‘dumber than a bag of bricks’

GOOGLE has announced its shortened links will cease to work in 2025 – and users are not happy.

The tech behemoth notified users of the change in a blog post Thursday.

It is only the latest in a series of inconveniences after Google shut down its link shortening service, goo.gl, in 2019 without ending support for existing links.

At the time, the company urged developers to transition to Firebase Dynamic Links (FDL) instead, but that has also since been deprecated.

Google discourages users from adopting Dynamic Links in projects that don’t already use it.

In the blog post, the company claimed it had encouraged the initial migration to FDL due to “changes we’ve seen in how people find content on the internet” and the explosion of popular URL shortening services at the time.

“Today, the time has come to turn off the serving portion of Google URL Shortener,” the company wrote.

“Any developers using links built with the Google URL Shortener in the form https://goo.gl/* will be impacted, and these URLs will no longer return a response after August 25th, 2025.”

Beginning next month, goo.gl links will begin displaying a message notifying users that the link will not be supported after August 25, 2025.

Beginning this August 23, users will be directed to a notification that “this link will no longer work in the near future.”

Google says the percentage of links for which this message appears will only increase as the shutdown date draws closer.

After the deadline, all links will simply return a 404 error response.

Google urges users to transition their links as soon as possible to avoid disruptions in linked and embedded content.

However, this advice isn’t sitting well with developers.

Enraged Reddit users took to the social network to blast Google for discontinuing yet another project.

“They abandon everything,” one user lamented.

“Remember Google Reader? Google Wave? (This one is basically MS Teams now; Google was a decade too early but had the right idea.)”

“I miss the google that thought of its self as a benevolent steward of the internet,” another netizen lamented.

One Redditor claimed the company “did a 180” on their original mission statement, “Don’t Be Evil.”

And a particularly enraged user went as far as to dub the platform and its fans “dumber than a bag of bricks.”

The tech giant has earned a sour reputation among users for discontinuing its popular services and products.

The losses are so extensive that an online list has sprung up, aptly named the “Google Graveyard.”

The most recent tool to go was VPN by Google One, which met a grim end last month.

The virtual private network was designed to provide users with an extra layer of security by encrypting their internet traffic.