A few hours ago, Twitter announced that they will close their video app Vine. The news broke on the official Vine blog.

Vine was founded in 2012 by Dom Hofmann, Rus Yusupov, and Colin Kroll in June 2012 and was bought a few months later by Twitter. At the end of 2013, the app was available for all types of operating systems. In a few months from its launching Vine became the most popular video recording app – as of May 2016 the most popular viner had more than 15 million followers. Viners recorded everything from everyday life, to short acts of stand-up comedy, animation, live music, social movements, albums launches (in 2013 Daft Punk’s Random Access album was presented on Vine) and ads (Dunkin Donuts used the app for their TV promo). At first, Vine had no competition, then Instagram came up with their video service (in June 2013, the app owned by Facebook came up with 15 seconds 640×640 videos that were followed by 60 seconds 1080 videos) and from then on the road went downhill.

“Since 2013, millions of people have turned to Vine to laugh at loops and see creativity unfold. Today, we are sharing the news that in the coming months we’ll be discontinuing the mobile app. Nothing is happening to the apps, website or your Vines today. We value you, your Vines, and are going to do this the right way. You’ll be able to access and download your Vines. We’ll be keeping the website online because we think it’s important to still be able to watch all the incredible Vines that have been made. You will be notified before we make any changes to the app or website.

What’s next? We’ll be working closely with creators to make sure your questions are answered and will work hard to do this the right way. We’ll be sharing more details on this blog and our Twitter account, and will notify you through the app when we start to change things.”

Previously Twitter announced that they will be cutting of 9% of their employees following the company’s decrease in growth.

Twitter killing Vine (and thus Vine stars) should be a lesson to all media outlets: Don’t base your distribution on someone else’s platform. — Dan Primack (@danprimack) October 27, 2016

I’m not a Vine user (I used it when there was a lot of buzz back in 2013-2014) and most of the people I know don’t use the service but thinking of those that spent their days as viners, it makes me sad that Twitter gave up to an app with so much potential – studies often said that a certain limitation (in this case Vine was know for its 6-second rule) makes us think of innovative ideas in our work.