Snap-owned GIF hub Gfycat to shut on September 1

Gfycat, the Snap-owned GIF-hosting platform, has announced that it will be shutting down the service on September 1.

"The Gfycat service is being discontinued. Please save or delete your Gfycat content by visiting https://www.gfycat.com and logging in to your account. After September 1, 2023, all Gfycat content and data will be deleted from gfycat.com," the company wrote on its website.

Users only have two months to save content before the company discontinues the service forever.

However, it's unclear whether Snap intends to integrate Gfycat content into Snapchat or delete years' worth of GIFs, reports TechCrunch.

“Snapchatters are still able to search for and use GIFs in their conversations with friends,” a Snapchat spokesperson was quoted as saying.

Gfycat was recently chastised after its TLS security certificate expired in May, rendering the platform inaccessible to most users for five days, the report said.

Furthermore, reports on Reddit indicate that some Gfycat users have been unable to upload GIFs for months, and the support team appears to have been unresponsive.

Gfycat, which was founded in 2013, was one of the first web services to allow video encoding of GIFs. Snap acquired the service in 2020. Earlier this year, Snap shut down its camera application for Mac and PCs on January 25.

Snap Camera allowed users to apply filters to their faces while they were on video conference calls.