Popular photo sharing apps Instagram and Snapchat have temporarily removed their Giphy GIF features. The developments come after a 21-year-old Snapchat user from the United Kingdom notified the company of a racist GIF. A similar racist GIF was spotted in Facebook-owned Instagram too. The GIF along with racial slur had a disturbing text. While this may come as a disappointment to GIF lovers, don't you forget GIFs are active on Instagram's parent company, Facebook. The widely-used messaging app, WhatsApp also lets you use GIFs without any hindrance.

While quick sending messaging apps changed the way we sent messages, GIF added fun to chats. Different emotions expressed through GIFs during conversations in the virtual world were improvised through GIFs. So in case, you are mourning the temporary demise of GIFs from your favorite apps, resort to Facebook and WhatsApp for now.

According to the TechCrunch report, this isn't the first time Snapchat has been accused of having racist content. The image messaging app faced heavy criticism in 2016 for creating an Asian 'yellowface' stereotype augmented reality lens which gave people slanted eyes.

Snapchat told TechCrunch, "As soon as we were made aware, we removed the GIF and have disabled Giphy until we can be sure that this won't happen again . . . while we wait for Giphy’s team to take a look at it." They quoted an Instagram spokesperson as saying, "This type of content has no place on Instagram. We have stopped our integration with Giphy as they investigate the issue." Meanwhile, we hope GIFs return to Snapchat and Instagram at the earliest dumping all racist content from them.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Mar 10, 2018 07:51 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).