Yahoo! nukes GeoCities

Build-you-own debuilt

By Cade Metz in San Francisco • Get more from this author

Posted in Music and Media, 26th October 2009 17:10 GMT

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Yahoo! is demolishing GeoCities today, a decade after acquiring the ticky-tacky build-your-own-website service for $3.57bn in stock.

In April, the company announced plans to raze the service and stopped accepting new users. "We have decided to discontinue the process of allowing new customers to sign up for GeoCities accounts as we focus on helping our customers explore and build new relationships online in other ways," the company said.

This summer, Yahoo! announced October 26 as demolition day, and at least two organizations have been scrambling to preserve as many GeoCities sites as possible. Yahoo! is deleting all pages from its servers without archiving them, leaving the likes of the Internet Archive and an archive team calling itself, er, the Archive Team to save all those blinking logos from the dustbin of history.

Yahoo! provides an FAQ on today's demolition here. ®

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