It's the end of the line for Yik Yak

RIP Yik Yak.
 By 
Emma Hinchliffe
 on 
It's the end of the line for Yik Yak
RIP. Credit: Ronald Lizik/AP/REX/Shutterstock

Yik Yak has been on its last legs for a while, and now the end is officially here.

The anonymous, location-based messaging app that rose to popularity in 2014 will "begin winding down" over the next week, Yik Yak co-founders Tyler Droll and Brooks Buffington wrote in a blog post Friday.

Square — yup, the Jack Dorsey-led payments company — acquired some of the Yik Yak engineering team for $1 million. Unsurprisingly, Square didn't want the app.

Yik Yak was once valued at $400 million and raised $73.5 million in venture funding. Then, it was plagued by cyberbullying on its platform and a dropoff in interest among the college and high school students who used it.

For an app whose core users were always college students, summer felt like the right time to end things, the co-founders said.

"With the school year drawing to a close for many of you and summer vacation on the horizon, now feels like a good time for us to say 'so long for summer' to y’all, too. To that end, we’ll begin winding down the Yik Yak app over the coming week as we start tinkering around with what’s ahead for our brand, our technology, and ourselves," Droll and Buffington wrote.

"We’re grateful to the users who made Yik Yak a place for laughs, camaraderie, stress relief, social comfort, news, memes, class recommendations, campus spirit, and so much more," they added. "We've loved being part of your college experience over the past four school years."

RIP Yik Yak.

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Emma Hinchliffe

Emma Hinchliffe is a business reporter at Mashable. Before joining Mashable, she covered business and metro news at the Houston Chronicle.

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