The shutdown announcement follows reports that the company’s free messaging app had allowed criminals to exchange images of child sexual abuse. “After careful consideration, we will be concentrating Wickr’s focus on securing our business and public sector customers’ data and communications with AWS Wickr and Wickr Enterprise, and have decided to discontinue our consumer product, Wickr Me,” Amazon said, adding that the company was working on allowing Wickr customers to securely communicate with individuals outside of their organization. Wickr’s other products, which are geared toward government agencies, military organizations and enterprises, won’t be impacted. The shutdown will only affect the consumer-facing version of Wickr, which has become popular among journalists and whistleblowers looking to send end-to-end encrypted and self-destructing messages. Amazon says the app will stop accepting new user registrations on Decembefore it’s discontinued completely the following year.

In a post published Friday, Amazon said that Wickr Me will shut down for good on December 31, 2023.

Wickr was founded in 2011 and became one of the first mainstream end-to-end encrypted messaging apps, until it was acquired by Amazon’s cloud services giant Amazon Web Services in 2021.

Secure communications provider Wickr has announced that it will shutter its free encrypted messaging app, Wickr Me, next year.

Shutdown messenger