Groups was a free-to-use system of electronic mailing lists offered by Yahoo!.

Depending on each group's settings, membership could be open to everyone or only to invited or approved people.

removed online access to discussions and all other features except simple membership management, essentially turning all groups into mailing lists, and on October 13, 2020, it announced that Yahoo Groups would shut down completely on December 15, 2020.

deleted adult groups from its search directory, making it very difficult to locate Yahoo!

It summarized, in a single email, all the updates that occurred every twenty-four hours in all groups.

Groups Japan emailed its users and posted a notice on its homepage, to announce that its service, which commenced in February 2004, would be closing on May 28, 2014.

[2][3] The site was closed down a few days after the advertised date, displaying a message that the service was officially shut down.

Groups started rolling out a major software change,[16] which was denounced by a large number of users.

[18] According to a September 9, 2013 Reuters article, "Americans use the Internet to abandon children adopted from overseas", Yahoo!

and Facebook groups were being used, illegally and without government regulation, by parents to advertise unwanted children for "private re-homing".

[20] In July 2010, the web analytics website Quantcast reported around 915 thousand unique visitors daily to the Yahoo!