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

GOOGLE has announced that its shortened links will stop working in 2025 – and users are not happy.

The tech giant notified users about the change in a blog post Thursday.

It’s just 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 encouraged developers to transition to Firebase Dynamic Links (FDL), but that has also happened since then. has been discontinued.

Google discourages users from adopting Dynamic Links in projects that do not already use it.

In the blog post, the company stated that it encouraged the initial migration to FDL due to “the changes we saw in the way people find content on the Internet” and the explosion of popular URL shortening services at the time.

“Today it’s time to turn off the serving portion Google URL shortener,” the company wrote.

“Any developer using links created with Google The URL shortener in the form will be affected and these URLs will no longer return a response after August 25, 2025.”

Start next month, goo.gl links will begin displaying a message notifying users that the link will no longer be supported after August 25, 2025.

Starting this August 23rd, 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 closing date approaches.

After deadlineall links will simply return a 404 error response.

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

However, this advice doesn’t sit well with developers.

Angry Reddit users took to the social network to explode Google for discontinuing yet another project.

“They abandon everything,” lamented one user.

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

“I miss Google, which considered itself a benevolent administrator of the Internet,” lamented another Internet user.

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

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

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

The losses are so extensive that an online list emerged, aptly called the “Google Graveyard.”

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

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