Twitter to close Vine video service

Twitter has announced that its video sharing service Vine will be discontinued as part of a plan to cut its costs.

On Thursday the social network revealed that 9 per cent of the company's staff would lose their jobs following a slow period of growth. The decision would result in 350 job losses, reports the Financial Times.

Vine is the first portion of Twitter's empire to be culled as part of the cuts and the paper says that the network may decide to chop other acquired businesses. It paid a reported £24.6m for the video clip service in 2012.

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When Vine was released in early 2013 it quickly became one of the most popular video sharing services for mobile devices, responsible for thousands of viral videos across social media. The quirky six-second clips were a perfect match for Twitter's 140 character limit posts.

A separate video platform integrated directly into Twitter has since been launched.

In a blog post, the company has outlined what will happen next in order to reassure fans – and the social media celebrities created by the platform – that their video clips aren't going anywhere.

"Nothing is happening to the apps, website or your Vines today", explains the post, adding that users will still be able to watch and download Vines for now, and will be notified of any changes in the future.

The BBC's technology reporter Dave Lee says that "Vine just couldn't compete with short video on Snapchat and Instagram, and that's why Twitter has decided to shut it down."

He adds that Twitter could integrate the vine format directly into its built-in video handler and it would be surprising to see Vine-like looping clips completely dropped.

The Verge adds: "The launch of video on Instagram in 2013 blunted its growth, and as with the rest of Twitter, its product added features at a glacial pace". It says that "significant" lay-offs at Vine began today.