Yahoo Answers Will Go Dark After 16 Years: How To Save Your Data

Yahoo has quietly announced that it will shutter its Yahoo Answers platform this summer, redirecting users to the Yahoo homepage and scrubbing its vast user-submitted archives from the Internet. Users who participated on the platform have the option of saving their data before the service goes dark, but you only have a few weeks to get it.

Yahoo revealed the decision to shut down Yahoo Answers using a banner placed at the top of the website. The notice, which was first spied by The Verge, notes that this is the only change coming to Yahoo at this time and that accounts and other services won't be impacted.

Yahoo Answers will be switched over to a read-only mode starting on April 20, transitioning into a full shutdown on May 4. If you head over to the company's support page on the topic, Yahoo says that you will no longer be able to access the Answers platform starting May 4 and that users will instead be redirected to the Yahoo homepage.

Users have until June 30 to download their Yahoo Answers data before it becomes unavailable. The data will include any Questions the user may have submitted, as well as answers and images. To download the content, you'll need to have your Yahoo account credentials to sign in; head over to the download tool to make the request.

The company notes that it may take up to 30 days for the user's data download to become available. The content is provided in JSON format, meaning you'll need to download a JSON parser to browse the data — assuming you don't want to dig through it using an ordinary text editor.