The site relaunched several times after its bankruptcy with a number of short-lived offerings, including instant messaging and video streaming, until its acquisition by Amazon in July 2019 when it was shut down.

Bebo was founded by husband-and-wife team Michael and Xochi Birch in January 2005 at their home in San Francisco.

[9] In 2010, on April 7, AOL announced that it would either sell the website[10] or shut it down; this was mainly due to the falling numbers of unique users moving to rival site Facebook.

[16] Adam Levin, CEO of Bebo and Criterion Capital Partners, stated that they were trying to release some new features which caused the site to crash.

[17] In May 2013, the company voluntarily filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection;[18][19] however, the receiver Burke Capital Corporation has clarified that Bebo remains "healthy" and "operating" and that the company was using its Chapter 11 filing on May 9 in Los Angeles to "restructure some operational inefficiencies and other arrangements that are burdensome."

[20] On July 1, 2013, Michael and Xochi Birch, the original founders, purchased the social network back from Criterion Capital Partners (CCP) for $1 million.

On August 7, 2013, a video featuring Michael announcing his plan for the new Bebo was placed on the front page of the site.

The announcement also stated that all user-content had been deleted, but users' blog posts and images would be retrievable in downloadable format should members opt-in to receive this.

The relaunch video emphasized Bebo's history in which it included its then-most popular feature: the whiteboard.

Bebo Blab shut down two years after its relaunch, as users weren't returning to the platform to watch archived streams on replay.

In July 2019, Amazon, through their subsidiary Twitch Interactive, acquired Bebo for US$25 million after outbidding Discord.

[26] In early 2021, the Bebo.com webpage began to display a series of messages suggesting a new relaunch of Bebo was imminent.

A "Video Box" could also be added, either hot-linked from YouTube or copied from a Bebo media content provider's page.

[30] Bebo network engineers traced the error to a misconfigured proxy server in an Internet service provider (ISP) in New Zealand, which was later corrected.