End of Era – AOL Is Going Dark

It’s a surprise to read that AOL are discontinuing their dial-up service on September 30th, 2025 and going dark, in part for the reminder that AOL are still a thing, and for the surprise that in 2025 they still operated a dial-up service.

I remember back in the 90’s and even early 2000’s, how AOL was made fun of because of their limited service(s).

With the end of AOL, there are only a very few small ISP’s still offering Dial-Up service via POTS.

Many will remember back in the 90’s we started receiving 3.5″ disks in the mail, and also started seeing them glued to the front of computer magazine.
Then in the early 2000’s they switched from Floppy Disk to CD’s Discs.
Always offering xx Free Hours.

If you used the internet at home a couple of decades or more ago, you’ll know the characteristic sound of a modem connecting to its dial-up server.
That noise is a thing of the past, as we long ago moved to Fiber, DSL, Wireless Providers and now Starlink that are always on.

There was a brief period in which instead of going online via the internet itself, the masses were offered online services through walled gardens of corporate content.
Companies such as AOL and Compuserve bombarded consumers with floppies and CD-ROMs containing their software, and even Microsoft dipped a toe in the market with the original MSN service before famously pivoting the whole organization in favor of the internet in mid 1995.
Compuserve was absorbed by AOL, which morphed into the most popular consumer dial-up ISP over the rest of that decade.
The dotcom boom saw them snapped up for an exorbitant price by Time Warner, only for the expected bonanza to never arrive, and by 2023 the AOL name was dropped from the parent company’s letterhead.
Over the next decade it dwindled into something of an irrelevance, and is now owned by Yahoo! as a content and email portal.
This dial-up service seems to have been the last gasp of its role as an ISP.

So the eternal September, so-called because the arrival of AOL users on Usenet felt like an everlasting version of the moment a fresh cadre of undergrads arrived in September, may at least in an AOL sense, finally be over. If you’re one of the estimated 0.2% of Americans still using a dial-up connection don’t despair, because there are a few other ISPs still (just) serving your needs.

Everyone, even non-AOL customers knew of the 3 window Connection Screen while hearing the modems negotiate the connection with beeps, bloops, and crackling sounds.

In an era dominated by broadband and wireless cellular networks, it came as a surprise to many that dial-up internet services like AOL still existed in the United States.

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And then there was AIM or aim, AOL’s Instant Messenger that came out in May 1997 as new new feature, not just for AOL users, but for Everyone as a Free download.

People either loved or hated AIM due to SPAMMERS in the mid-90’s sending unwanted messages with ads.

During its heyday, its main competitors were ICQ (which AOL acquired in 1998), Yahoo! Messenger and MSN Messenger.
AOL particularly had a rivalry or “chat war” with PowWow and Microsoft, starting in 1999.
There were several attempts from Microsoft to simultaneously log into their own and AIM’s protocol servers.
AOL was unhappy about this and started blocking MSN Messenger from being able to access AIM.
This led to efforts by many companies to challenge the AOL and Time Warner merger on the grounds of antitrust behavior, leading to the formation of the OpenNet Coalition.

Around 2011, AIM started to lose popularity rapidly, partly due to the quick rise of Gmail and its built-in real-time Google Chat instant messenger integration in 2011 and because many people migrated to SMS or iMessages text messaging and later, social networking websites and apps for instant messaging, in particular, Facebook Messenger, which was released as a standalone application the same year. AOL made a partnership to integrate AIM messaging in Google Talk, and had a feature for AIM users to send SMS messages directly from AIM to any number, as well as for SMS users to send an IM to any AIM user.

As of June 2011, one source reported AOL Instant Messenger market share had collapsed to 0.73%.
However, this number only reflected installed IM applications, and not active users.
The engineers responsible for AIM claimed that they were unable to convince AOL management that free was the future.

On March 3, 2012, AOL ended employment of AIM’s development staff while leaving it active and with help support still provided.
On October 6, 2017, it was announced that the AIM service would be discontinued on December 15.

However, a non-profit development team known as Wildman Productions started up a server for older versions of AOL Instant Messenger, known as AIM Phoenix