Google has decided to shut down the consumer version of its social network Google+ after the personal data of around half a million users were announced to might have been exposed to foreign developers through a bug that was present in its systems for more than two years.

The company described the situation in a blog where it said that they had discovered the data breach in March of this year and patched the leak in the same time and had found no evidence of misuse of user data or that any developer was aware or had exploited the vulnerability.

Google announced in a blog post, “Our Privacy & Data Protection Office reviewed this issue, looking at the type of data involved, whether we could accurately identify the users to inform, whether there was any evidence of misuse, and whether there were any actions a developer or user could take in response.”

Google stated, “None of these thresholds were met in this instance. We found no evidence that any developer was aware of this bug or abusing the API, and we found no evidence that any Profile data was misused.”

According to The Wall Street Journal report, Google decided not to disclose the issue with its Application Program Interfaces (API) partly due to fears of regulatory scrutiny, citing unnamed sources and internal documents.

According to the WSJ report, the affected data was limited to static, optional Google+ Profile fields including name, email address, occupation, gender and age.

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