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AOL is finally shutting down its dial-up internet service | AP News
By WYATTE GRANTHAM-PHILIPS

August 11, 2025

NEW YORK (AP) - AOL's dial-up internet is finally taking its last bow.

Yes, while perhaps a dinosaur by today's digital standards, dial-up is
still around. But AOL says it's officially pulling the plug for its
service on Sept. 30.

"AOL routinely evaluates its products and services and has decided to discontinue Dial-up Internet," AOL wrote in a brief update on its support
site - noting that dial-up and associated software "optimized for older operating systems" will soon be unavailable on AOL plans.

AOL, formerly America Online, introduced many households to the world wide
web for the first time when its dial-up service launched decades ago,
rising to prominence particularly in the 90s and early 2000s.

The creaky door to the internet was characterized by a once-ubiquitous
series of beeps and buzzes heard over the phone used to connect your
computer online - along with frustrations of being kicked off the web if
anyone else at home needed the landline for another call, and an endless bombardment of CDs mailed out by AOL to advertise free trials.

Eventually, broadband and wireless offerings emerged and rose to
dominance, doing away with dial-up's quirks for most people accessing the internet today.

Still, a handful of consumers have continued to rely on internet services connected over telephone lines. In the U.S., according to Census Bureau
data, an estimated 163,401 households were using dial-up alone to get
online in 2023, representing just over 0.13% of all homes with internet subscriptions nationwide.

AOL was the largest dial-up internet provider for some time, but not the
only one to emerge over the years. Some smaller internet providers
continue to offer dial-up today. Regardless, the decline of dial-up has
been a long time coming. And AOL shutting down its service arrives as
other relics of the internet's earlier days continue to disappear.

Microsoft retired video calling service Skype just earlier this year, for example - as well as Internet Explorer back in 2022. And in 2017, AOL discontinued its Instant Messenger - a chat platform that was once lauded
as the biggest trend in online communication since email when it was
founded in 1997, but later struggled to ward off rivals.

AOL itself is far from the dominant internet player it was decades ago -
when, beyond dial-up and IMs, the company also became known for its
"You've got mail" catchphrase that greeted users who checked their
inboxes, as famously displayed in the 1998 film starring Tom Hanks and Meg
Ryan by the same name.

Before it was America Online, AOL was founded as Quantum Computer Services
in 1985. It soon rebranded and hit the public market in 1991. Near the
height of the dot-com boom, AOL's market value reached nearly $164 billion
in 2000. But tumultuous years followed, and that valuation plummeted as
the once-tech pioneer bounced between multiple owners. After a disastrous merger with Time Warner Inc., Verizon acquired AOL - which later sold AOL, along with Yahoo, to a private equity firm.

At the time Verzion announced that sale to in 2021, an anonymous source familiar with the transaction told CNBC that the number of AOL dial-up
users was "in the low thousands," down from 2.1 million when Verzion first moved to acquire AOL in 2015 - and far below peak demand seen back in the
90s and early 2000s. But beyond dial-up, AOL continues to offer its free
email services, as well as subscriptions that advertise identity
protection and other tech support.
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