Facebook is shutting down the external 'Like' button

It's the end of a major Web 2.0 era.

Meta announced on Monday that it would be sunsetting two once-major features on Facebook: The external "Like" and Comment" social plugins.

In a post on its developer site, Meta shared that the FB Like and FB Comment buttons will officially be discontinued on February 10, 2026.

According to Meta, developers won't have to do anything. The plugins will simply render as an invisible 0x0 pixel at the end date. Meta says none of these changes should impact any website's functionality.

In the early days of social media, social plugins were everywhere. Facebook's social plugins first launched in 2016. Websites and blog posts across the web proudly displayed these social media buttons from the major social platforms like Facebook, allowing users to log into their social media account of choice and like, share, and comment using that social profile. These social media buttons would often update, displaying stats that showed just how much that piece of content was shared or liked on a platform.

Facebook, being the biggest and most popular social network of its time, usually had its social plugin buttons featured prominently on websites big and small. This was, of course, quite advantageous for Facebook. Not just because it reflected its prominence in the social media space, but also because the company was able to collect user data even from content on third-party platforms.

"This change reflects our commitment to maintaining a modern, efficient platform that serves developers' current needs while enabling us to invest in future innovations," Meta wrote in its post announcing the end of the external FB Like and Comment buttons feature. "The plugins that will be discontinued reflect an earlier era of web development, and their usage has naturally declined as the digital landscape has evolved."

Meta isn't wrong. It's clear that the use of these social plugins has greatly waned. However, the reason these social plugins no longer seem so relevant is due to the varying ways people use the internet in 2025.

Content is being discovered on apps more than ever before, and the likes and comments that do happen now occur on Facebook directly. Social media itself has basically rendered external social plugins obsolete.