Google+, the social network of the tech giant Google, will reportedly be shut down as a bug, which exposed private data of up to 500,000 users to external developers, was discovered .

Making the announcement in a blog post on Monday, Google Fellow and vice-president of engineering Ben Smith noted that the Indian-American headed company could not confirm which users were impacted by the bug.

Smith said that the technical bug was detected as part of an effort called Project Strobe started by Google early this year. It is a root-and-branch review of third-party developer access to Google accounts and Android device data and of the philosophy around apps' data access.

Sunder Pichai, the Indian-American CEO of Google, was briefed on the plan to not notify users after an internal committee had reached that decision.

The Google announcement indicated that Google+ would be fully shut down by August 2019, to allow users to download and migrate their information.