A comment said they stopped making new links and announced back in 2018 it would be going away.

I'm not a google fanboi and the google graveyard is a well known thing, but this has been 6+ years coming.

For one, not enough people seem to be aware of it. They don't seem to have given that announcement the importance and effort it deserved. Secondly, I can't say that they have a good migration plan when shutting down their services. People scrambling like this to backup the data is rather common these days. And finally, this isn't a service that can be so easily replaced. Even if people knew that it was going away, there would be short-links that they don't remember, but are important nevertheless. Somebody gave an example above - citations in research papers. There isn't much thought given to the consequences when decisions like this are taken.

Granted that it was a free service and Google is under no obligation to keep it going. But if they were going to be so casual about it, they shouldn't have offered it in the first place. Or perhaps, people should take that lesson instead and spare themselves the pain.

I just went through the old thread and it's comments. It appears google didn't specifically state they were going to end the service. They hinted that links would continue working, but new ones would not be able to be created. It was left a bit open-ended, and that likely made people think the links would work indefinitely.

This seems to be echoed by the archiveteam scrambling to get this archived. I figure they would have backed these up years ago if it was more well known.