Twitter is Shutting Down Vine

Twitter is shutting down video-sharing service Vine "in the coming months," the company announced Thursday. Vine, which lets you ...

Twitter is shutting down video-sharing service Vine "in the coming months," the company announced Thursday. Vine, which lets you share short video clips, debuted in 2013. Twitter acquired Vine in 2012 before the service had even launched.

The news comes the same day Twitter announced it would lay off more than 300 workers, or 9% of the company's global workforce, within the company's sales, partnerships, and marketing teams.

"Nothing is happening to the apps, website or your Vines today," Twitter said in a release, adding that users will be given a heads-up and be able to download their Vines before the app shutters for good.

"Nothing is happening to the apps, website or your Vines today," Twitter said in a release, adding that users will be given a heads-up and be able to download their Vines before the app shutters for good.

"Don’t sell your company!" Vine co-founder RusYusupov, who was laid off from Twitter in October 2015, wrote in a tweet.

Acquired by Twitter in 2012, Vine started off strong, becoming the No. 1 app on the iTunes App Store only six months after joining the company. At one point, Vine had more than 200 million active users, yet it struggled to maintain traction and saw a decline in popularity in recent months.

Competition from Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube made it difficult to stand out from the pack. According to data from App Annie, Vine has since dropped to No. 284 in the top charts for free applications on iOS, down from the low 100s at the beginning of the year. It’s still fairly well-ranked (No. 24) in the Photo & Video category, but hasn’t placed on the Entertainment apps top charts since 2015.

Vine has struggled to retain its top creators. By July, over half of Vine's top 9,725 accounts had either deleted their profiles or stopped posting to the platform since the start of 2016, according to research by Makerly. This data corroborated an earlier report in The Wall Street Journal that Vine’s stars were leaving for competitors like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. One, Cameron Dallas, even snagged his own Netflix show.

Year-over-year worldwide downloads of the Vine app declined 55 percent in Q3 across both the Apple App Store and Google Play, according to Sensor Tower’s data.

This is just the latest social media app to throw in the towel. Selfie app Shots, recently rebranded as Shots Studios and is looking to create YouTube content with former Vine stars.

At the time of the report, Twitter told The Washington Post that Vine was still "an important part of our strategy."