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Beluga Is Shutting Down, Facebook Messenger Lives On

Beluga, the messaging company Facebook bought in March this year, will not be available as a separate service anymore. “Now that Facebook Messenger is available everywhere, we’ve decided to stop offering Beluga as a separate service,” said the company in a blog post.

You can keep using Beluga for the time being, but you had better start acrhiving your messages right now, and backing them up. The srevice is being phased out over the next few weeks. Starting November 11, you’ll no longer be able to use Beluga to send messages. On December 15, the Beluga service will shut down completely, and you’ll no longer be able to access your old pods or messages.

Beluga is the brainchild of three ex-Googlers Lucy Zhang, Ben Davenport, and Jon Perlow, the same team that helped Facebook build its standalone messaging system. Now that the Facebook Messaging system is in place, it did not really make sense for two similar services to coexist under the same banner.

“We’d like to thank you all for being such enthusiastic and loyal users. We’ll continue to use your feedback to improve Messenger and make messaging your friends easier, faster and more fun,” concludes the Beluga team.

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