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Meta is killing off the external Facebook Like button

The platform's sharing plugin will also be discontinued.

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Anna Washenko
Contributing Reporter
UpdatedMon, November 10, 2025 at 9:47 PM UTC
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[FB_like_an]
Illustration of the social plugins from Facebook ahead of their
discontinuation. (Meta)

Next year will see the end arrive for two of Facebook's external
social plugins. The platform's Like button and Share button for
third-party websites will be discontinued on February 10, 2026. The
blog post from Meta explains that site admins shouldn't have to take
any additional steps as a result of the change, although they can
choose to remove the plugins before the discontinue date. Any
remaining plugins will "gracefully degrade," which sounds much more
dramatic than what will actually happen, which is that they'll render
as a 0x0 invisible element.

Ending support for these features marks the end of an era for Meta
and Facebook. External Like and Share buttons were introduced in
2010. The tools were promoted as ways for sites to generate more
traffic through the social network, which was a major way that people
shared and saw articles at that time. The company's official line is
that the plugins "reflect an earlier era of web development, and
their usage has naturally declined as the digital landscape has
evolved." But Facebook also plays a much smaller role in the broader
Meta business operation than it once did, and anecdotally, it's less
common to see sites running only integrations with a single social
network.

Update, November 10, 2025, 4:45PM ET: Corrected the original release
date for the plugins.

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