Google to pull off URL shortener by August 2025

FDL will also stop working alongwith Google URL Shortener by August 2025

Tech Desk - Jul 19, 2024

An undated image of a search bar. — Unsplash

Are you continuously facing link rot issues? There is nothing to worry about because Google, an Alphabet-owned company, will soon fix this issue by shutting down the Google URL shortener service in 2025.

Google Uniform Resource Locator (URL) shortener was released back in 2009, for appropriate management of links. But, now the Alphabet-owned company has finally decided to pull off the service and connect all the users to Firebase Dynamic Links (FDL) in 2018.

"All existing links will continue to redirect to the intended destination," Google said in an official statement.

This entire shutdown procedure would be quite slow as from August 23, 2024, google links would exhibit an interstitial page which would entirely stop working till August 25, 2025, and become irresponsive.

However, it would be an extremely irritating procedure for all the users as the links would return to a 404 response that's why Google engineers are trying to hasten the procedure.

However, Google’s advice to move to FDL worked well in 2018 but now the software has been derogated so the functionality is expected to shut down along with the Google URL shortener by August 2025.