Google shut Orkut down on September 30, 2014, and by then it was not in any meaningful sense an American website: its users were overwhelmingly Brazilian and Indian, and it had already lost both of those countries to Facebook. Google announced the closure on June 30, 2014 in a post titled "Tchau Orkut," using the Portuguese word for goodbye, and published its follow-up about preserving the site's history on the Official Google India Blog.
That geography is the story, and it is the part almost every page answering this question leaves out. Orkut gets written up as a product decision made in California. It was a product decision made about Brazil.
Orkut Started American and Stopped Being American Within a Year
Orkut launched on January 22, 2004, the day Search Engine Watch covered its arrival, and it was invitation only. It was built by Orkut Büyükkökten, a Google engineer, and carried his first name.
The site used to publish its own breakdown of where members lived. Surviving copies show the United States as the clear majority in early 2004 and Brazil passing it within months. That page is gone and every version of those percentages now in circulation is second hand, so the shape of the shift is reliable and the decimals are not.
The Orkut user figures that do come with a named source attached are these two:
- CIO, carrying a Reuters report, September 1, 2006: roughly 27 million users worldwide, about 17.6 million of them in Brazil.
- ABC News, April 10, 2008: about 55 percent of Orkut's 60 million plus users worldwide were Brazilian.
India was the other pillar, and Orkut led the Indian market until 2010, a fact established by the measurement that ended it.
None of this is odd once you stop assuming the internet's center of gravity sat in California that decade. The most watched video of those years came out of Seoul, which is most of why Gangnam Style was so popular, and the defining mobile game of the period came out of a Finnish studio, which is much of what happened to Angry Birds.
Google Moved the Product to Brazil, and Part of the Reason Was Legal
This thread separates Orkut from every other closed Google service, and it is documented.
On September 1, 2006, CIO reported, from Reuters, that a Brazilian federal judge named in the report as Jose Lunardelli had ordered Google to hand over Orkut user information sought by federal prosecutors, with a penalty of about $23,255 per day for each denied request. Google's Brazilian representatives said the data sat on servers in the United States, that handing it over would breach US law, and that the local office "handles only marketing and sales functions and is not in charge of Orkut operations." Prosecutors were seeking to identify users of communities connected to child sexual abuse material and to hate speech against Black, Jewish and gay people.
The standoff ran about two years. On April 10, 2008, ABC News reported that Alexandre Hohagen, then head of Google Brazil, appeared before a Brazilian Senate inquiry and committed the company to measures on Orkut: filters against the distribution of child sexual abuse material, retention of user data raised from 30 days to six months for the accounts involved, and notifying authorities with copies of the material. Hohagen said the measures would "likely be effective by June."
A formal accord followed in July 2008, signed during the congressional inquiry, reported by NBC News carrying the Associated Press. That report could not be opened directly for this article, so it is cited as a report rather than quoted.
In the same year Google moved Orkut's management and operation to Google Brazil, in Belo Horizonte. That is consistently described in accounts of the period, but no original Google announcement of it could be opened here, so treat the year as well attested and the detail as second hand.
The direction of travel is what matters. A product built inside Google in California ended up run from the country that used it, under pressure from that country's courts. Nothing similar happened to any later Google social product.
The Two Dates Orkut Actually Lost, and They Are Different Dates
Orkut did not lose one race. It lost two, in two countries, sixteen months apart.
| Market | Facebook passes Orkut | The measurement |
|---|---|---|
| India | July 2010 | comScore: Facebook reached 20.9 million visitors and took first place in India for the first time, up 179 percent year on year against Orkut's 16 percent |
| Brazil | December 2011 | comScore: Facebook 36.1 million visitors against Orkut's 34.4 million, published January 17, 2012 |
The comScore release on Brazil quoted Alex Banks, its managing director there: "Facebook's rapid ascent in the Brazilian market has certainly been one of the most interesting stories to develop during the course of 2011."
By the start of 2012, Orkut was second in both of the countries that were essentially its whole user base, and it ran another two years and nine months before Google closed it. A leader can lose its position years before the product ends, the same shape as what happened to BlackBerry phones.
June 30, 2014: What Google Actually Said
The announcement was written by Paulo Golgher, an engineering director, and posted on the Orkut blog. Its central sentence:
"Over the past decade, YouTube, Blogger and Google+ have taken off, with communities springing up in every corner of the world. Because the growth of these communities has outpaced Orkut's growth, we've decided to bid Orkut farewell (or, tchau)."
Three things took effect at once. No new accounts could be created from that day. Existing users had until September 30, 2014. And people could export their profile data, community posts and photos with Google Takeout, an option Google said would stay available until September 2016. Google also said it would keep an archive of all public communities online.
Note what the stated reason is not. Google did not cite the Brazilian legal history, and did not cite Facebook. It cited its own other products.
What Happened to Your Scraps, Photos and Communities
This is the part a reader searching this usually wants, so here it is plainly.
Profile data, scrapbook posts and photos: recoverable only if you exported them with Google Takeout before that window closed in September 2016. Google's Orkut support page now states that "It is no longer possible to save items associated with your Orkut profile."
Public communities: Google's support page, read on August 24, 2026, still tells readers that "Orkut was officially shut down on September 30, 2014, but you can view public community discussions in the Community Archive," and links that archive to the address orkut.google.com.
That address did not resolve when we checked it on August 24, 2026. The hostname returned a DNS failure. Google's own documentation is still pointing readers at an archive whose address does not answer, and the two sources in conflict there are Google's support page and Google's own DNS.
What survives is outside Google. The Internet Archive holds captures of the community archive pages and a separate Orkut community list, and Archive Team crawled the site before the shutdown. The copy that lasted was made by volunteers.
The Numbers That Circulate Without a Source
Orkut retrospectives are full of totals: a peak user count, a Brazil-versus-Facebook ratio, a country share. Most trace back to nothing.
Google never published a lifetime or peak total for Orkut. The two worldwide figures used above, from 2006 and 2008, are the ones attached to a named publication and a date. A widely repeated figure of around 300 million is associated with statements from Orkut's founder rather than from Google, which makes it a claim by an interested party rather than a measurement, so it is left out.
A smaller disagreement is worth naming because a reader will hit it. Accounts of Büyükkökten's later network, Hello, do not agree on when it started: Wikipedia dates the launch to May 1, 2016, while Entrackr covered it as a launch from India in April 2018.
What Circulates Versus What the Record Shows
| The common version | What the record shows |
|---|---|
| "Nobody used it, so Google closed it" | Google's stated reason was that YouTube, Blogger and Google+ had outgrown it. Orkut still had a large Brazilian and Indian base at closure |
| "Facebook killed Orkut early on" | comScore has Facebook passing Orkut in India in July 2010 and in Brazil in December 2011. Orkut ran nearly three more years |
| "A failed American social network" | Majority Brazilian from 2004, with management moved to Google Brazil in 2008 |
| "Purely a product decision" | The product decision is documented. So is a separate Brazilian legal history from 2006 to 2008 that the announcement does not mention |
| "You can still browse the old communities" | Google's support page says so and links to orkut.google.com. That address did not resolve on August 24, 2026 |
orkut.com Today
The domain is alive. Visited on August 24, 2026, orkut.com carries an open letter from Büyükkökten about kindness online and "something new," signed "stay beautiful, – Orkut." It carries no date and announces no product, and it has been in roughly this state since the domain was reactivated in 2022. A letter is not a relaunch.
FAQ
When did Orkut shut down?
Orkut closed on September 30, 2014. Google announced it on June 30, 2014 and stopped allowing new accounts from the announcement date.
Why did Google shut down Orkut?
Google's stated reason was that YouTube, Blogger and Google+ had grown faster than Orkut. It did not cite Facebook, though comScore has Facebook overtaking Orkut in India in July 2010 and in Brazil in December 2011, its two largest markets.
Which country used Orkut the most?
Brazil. ABC News reported in April 2008 that about 55 percent of Orkut's 60 million plus users worldwide were Brazilian, and Google moved Orkut's management to Google Brazil that year. India was the second market.
Can I get my old Orkut photos and scraps back?
No, unless you exported them with Google Takeout before that option closed in September 2016. Google's own support page now states that it is no longer possible to save items associated with an Orkut profile.
Is the Orkut community archive still online?
Google's support page still points to a Community Archive at orkut.google.com. When we checked that address on August 24, 2026 it did not resolve. Captures of those pages, and a separate community list, exist at the Internet Archive.