Google has announced yet another data breach affecting its Google+ social network.

This incident is separate to the one that came to light in October, which prompted Google to announce that it would shut Google+ down – a decision that the Wall Street Journal said was calculated to avoid reputational damage and regulatory interest.

Following the latest incident, Google has decided to close Google+ four months earlier than originally planned.

According to Google’s statement, it “recently determined that some users were impacted by a software update introduced in November that contained a bug affecting a Google+ API. No third party compromised our systems, and we have no evidence that the app developers that inadvertently had this access for six days were aware of it or misused it in any way”.

The bug is said to have affected 52.5 million users and involves such data as:

Name

Email address

Occupation

Age

Google will now “expedite the shut-down of all Google APIs” within the next 90 days and consumer Google+ will be gone in April 2019.