CentOS - Jan 2015 - Reason for removing php-mcrypt from CentOS 6/7

Does anybody know why php-mcrypt was removed from the extras repo when CentOS 6
came out?
I've been going through the archives and I saw plenty of people complain
about it but no explanation for the reason.

I know it's available in EPEL but I want to avoid third party repos if at
all possible.
If for some reason it became no longer advisable to use php-mcrypt in production
then knowing that reason would be helpful.