Sunsetting Beacon Network (February 15, 2026)
Leena Mansour
Hello,
We’re writing to share an important update.
The Beacon Network (beacon-network.org) helped prove a seminal idea: organizations can responsibly share insights across distributed environments without moving sensitive data; through simple, privacy-preserving discovery and meaningful community collaboration.
Building on that foundation, we developed Omics AI, a GA4GH-compliant platform for federated data governance, discovery, access, and analysis; extending Beacon’s core principles into a unified, scalable platform designed for real-world use.
At the center of this evolution is Questions, a self-serve capability that generalizes the original Beacon concept and makes it possible to ask questions of distributed datasets without copying or transferring sensitive information. Questions is already in production, including supporting HiFi Solves to share variant insights globally.
With this next chapter in place, we’re preparing to thoughtfully retire the Beacon Network.
What’s happeningThe Beacon Network site and associated services will be taken offline on February 15th.
Until then, everything will remain accessible as usual.
After shutdown, the service and related infrastructure will be fully retired.
If you or your organization still depend on the Beacon Network, please plan to make any final queries or exports before the shutdown. If this change will impact your workflows, we’d genuinely like to hear from you.
Want to explore Questions?We’d be delighted to show you how Questions and Omics AI carry forward, and expand, the original vision first sparked by Beacon.
Please reach out to in...@dnastack.com to learn more.
Thank you for being part of the Beacon Network community. Your participation helped launch a global movement toward secure, privacy-preserving insight-sharing. With Omics AI and Questions, that movement is now evolving into something even more powerful.
Best regards,
The Beacon Network Team