In October, Yahoo announced that it would be deleting all content posted on Yahoo Groups on December 14th. But today, the company said that it’s extending that deadline another couple of weeks to give users more time to download their data.
If you want to get your Yahoo Groups data before it is deleted, Yahoo says that you now have until 11:59PM PST on January 31st, 2020, to request it. (If you want to download your data, here’s our guide on how to do it.)
We will stop making the content available or viewable from the https://t.co/AI347YbZxo portal at 11:59 PM PT on Dec 14, 2019, but we will not delete it until all requests submitted prior to Jan 31, 2020 have been processed.
— Yahoo Customer Care (@YahooCare) December 10, 2019
As noted in Yahoo’s tweets, you still won’t be able to view content on Yahoo Groups after December 14th. Yahoo stopped allowing users to upload content on October 28th, so Yahoo Groups have already become pretty limited.
Once Yahoo deletes the data, a significant chunk of internet history will be gone for good. Some archivists say they have been joining groups using “semi-automated scripts” in an attempt to archive data before everything is deleted, but Verizon Media (which owns Yahoo) has apparently banned 128 archivists, saying that their actions violated its terms of service, severely hampering their archival efforts.
A Yahoo spokesperson told The Verge that the company has also extended the deadline for when it will convert public groups into restricted groups to January 31st. That means if you want to join a group after that date, you’ll have to request an invite or be invited by a group admin.
Despite the extensions, today’s announcement doesn’t change the fact that, soon, the only thing you’ll be able to do on Yahoo Groups is email the members of groups that you’re a part of. And sadly, there’s always the chance that Yahoo may someday shut down Groups forever.