Gfycat, a popular source for user-generated GIFs and videos, is soon shutting down, with a deadline of September 1st, 2023.
While a specific reason for this demise is not mentioned, Snap, the parent company of Gfycat, has long made it’s killing the platform sometime. As the day arrives, Gfycat asks its users to save any of their favourite GIFs from the platform, as everything will be deleted after the deadline.
The Demise of Gfycat
While killing the dormant or unpopular tech is usual, ending a fairly popular service is unexpected – like the demise of Gfycat, for example. The GIF repository is so famous after Giphy and is appreciated by the community for its simple tools. People can create GIFs from videos and quickly store and share them across any supported platform.
Gfycat also has GIFs with sounds, short videos, and even a paid version for an ad-free browsing experience and HD video playback support. Well, when the time comes, not even the best services have long periods on the internet. And Gfycat is one such example, as its parent Snap is killing it soon.
Setting the deadline as September 1st, 2023, Gfycat’s website states the service is being discontinued and asks users to save their favourite content by logging in to their account. After the said deadline, Gfycat claims to erase all its data.
Well, this was expected for a long time. In May, Motherboard reported that Snap allowed Gfycat’s security certificates to expire – making the platform temporarily inaccessible to most internet users. Even before this, several people doubted the staff at Gfycat, as there were no responses from the support teams when needed, and broken uploads were found occasionally.