Yik Yak, the location-based social media app, is going dark.
Co-founders Tyler Droll and Brooks Buffington announced in a blog post published Friday that Yik Yak would start winding down its operations over the coming week.
“The time has come, however, for our paths to part ways, as we’ve decided to make our next move as a company,” the post reads.
The social media app enables users (known as “Yakkers”) within an eight-kilometre radius to post messages and interact with each other online. It was originally launched by Droll and Buffington in 2013.
The Atlanta-based social media app made the announcement shortly after Square Inc, a San Francisco-based financial services company, reportedly acquired Yik Yak’s engineering team, consisting of five to 10 engineers.
Yik Yak’s blog post on Friday simply said that “a few members” of their team would be joining Square in Atlanta. Tyler Droll is reportedly not among their number.
The app gained a following at post-secondary institutions in particular, with Yik Yak claiming that more than 2,000 college campuses in the U.S. alone use it.
But it also became a platform occasionally used for both hate speech and bomb threats. In 2015, classes at Western Washington University were suspended after several posts were found featuring lynching references and racist threats against then-student government president Belina Seare.
Yik Yak has also been frequently used as a platform for cyber bullying.
The company, itself, did try to curtail abuses of the app by rating it as 17+ in both the Apple and Google Play stores, and tried to make the app unavailable to anyone trying to use it near elementary or high schools.
The company condemned discrimination voiced by users on Yik Yak.
“This sort of misbehaviour is not what Yik Yak is to be used for. Period,” the company wrote after a user near the University of Missouri made a racist post back in 2015.
With files from Dan Taekema and Bloomberg News
