External Facebook Like Button Is Being Discontinued by Meta

Essential Points

• Discontinuation Date: The Facebook Like and Share buttons for third-party websites will be discontinued on February 10, 2026.
• No Action Required: Site admins are not required to take any steps, although they may remove the plugins beforehand.
• Impact on Users: Remaining plugins will become invisible and no longer function as intended.
• Historical Context: These features, introduced in 2013, reflect a shift in web development and user engagement on social media.

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 2013. 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.