ICQ will finally cease to exist next month

You need to be of a certain age to even know what ICQ is – don’t worry, we are too. One of the pioneers of the online messaging space, it went head to head with AIM and Yahoo Messenger (remember those?) many, many years ago, and you may have thought it was long dead. We know we did. But no.

Somehow, ICQ (if you say it out loud, it makes sense – it sounds like “I seek you” which may feel creepy now but wasn’t in 1996 when it was launched) has survived, and still exists. Not for long, though. It will stop working on June 26. RIP.

ICQ was bought by AOL in 1998 and by the Mail.Ru Group (now VK) in 2010. Since it’s still owned by VK, the company suggests you use VK Messenger to chat with friends and VK WorkSpace to talk to your colleagues from June 26 onwards.

At its peak around 2001, ICQ had more than 100 million accounts registered (which was a much bigger number then than it is now considering how many people had access to the internet back then vs. now). According to Wikipedia, ICQ still had about 11 million monthly active users in 2022. Probably not anymore, though.

AIM was killed in December 2017, and Yahoo Messenger died in 2019. And now another one of the big names in the IM space two decades ago is going. We’re all the better for it, of course, with WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger and Telegram and iMessage and all the rest of the services we use today, which are much superior to ICQ and the likes.

Via