Twitter has announced that Vine, its short-video sharing app, is being discontinued. The mobile app, used to create six-second looping videos, will be shut down. The company says that the website and Vine data will be kept around, at least for the time being, and that the app isn't going away immediately. But it will be going away soon.

In a broader effort to cut costs, Twitter announced this morning that it is laying off some 9 percent of its staff. These cuts are focused primarily in sales and marketing, but the Verge is reporting that the Vine team has also been significantly affected.

When Twitter bought Vine in 2012, ahead of the product launch in 2013, its own media capabilities were very weak. But that's not the case today. With video now directly embeddable within Twitter (albeit without the tight length constraints—Twitter supports 140 seconds, to Vine's six) the value of the standalone service has become less clear. Apparently Twitter agrees, though Vine's 200 million monthly active users may nonetheless be disappointed.