ICQ to shut down after solid 30 years

The Russian business VK, which has operated the once-popular instant messaging service ICQ since 2010, has stated that “ICQ will stop working from June 26.”

The corporation encourages users to switch to its other chat services. According to its Wikipedia article, ICQ had approximately 11 million monthly users in 2022.

ICQ, founded in 1996 by Israeli business Mirabilis, was one of the first platforms to enable real-time chatting.

It is an unceremonious end for a software tool that helped pioneer instant chatting on PCs in the 1990s. ICQ, which stands for “I Seek You,” was developed at Mirabilis, an Israeli business, before being purchased by AOL for $407 million in 1998.

The latest version of ICQ appeared to work and function similarly to other messaging apps like WhatsApp and Telegram. According to a March 2023 Internet Archive snapshot of the iOS App Store listing, the app is no longer available on either Apple’s digital store or Google’s Play Store (and has been for months). 

It appears that ICQ has already been done for some time; perhaps VK is simply making it official.