Chat service ICQ will cease to exist on June 26

Chat service ICQ will cease to exist on June 26, 2024. This was announced on the platform's website. Russian parent company VK Group does not give a reason for the discontinuation and advises users to switch to chat platforms VK Messenger and VK WorkSpace.

The announcement can be read on the ICQ website. VK Group is not making any mention of a possible restart for the time being. The decision therefore appears to be final. ICQ, also known as 'I seek you', is a chat service that was launched on November 15, 1996. The service was developed at the time by Mirabilis, a company founded by four Israeli students. To send messages with the first version, users had to connect to the udp 4000 port on icq.mirabilis.com.

About a year after ICQ's introduction, the chat service reportedly already had more than 5 million users and 1.3 million users were active daily. In 1998, a million new ICQ users were added every three weeks. The popularity of ICQ had not gone unnoticed by America Online. AOL bought Mirabilis in 1998 for $287 million and took over management of the chat service.

ICQ had more than 100 million registered users in 2001, but the chat service also faced increasing competition from alternatives, including MSN Messenger. In the Western world, ICQ's popularity began to decline, but the platform remained popular in Russian-speaking countries. AOL sold ICQ in 2010. The American company then sold the chat service for $187.5 million to Digital Sky Technologies, then one of the largest internet companies in Russia and Eastern Europe and the company behind Mail.ru, VK Messenger and VK Workspace. At that time, the chat service could still count on more than 40 million active users.

Despite the fact that ICQ was available for Windows, macOS, Linux, BlackBerry, Android and iOS, development came to a minimum. to stand. This development will therefore be permanently stopped from 26 June. ICQ must have existed for a total of more than 27 years.