If you are old enough to remember the signature pinging, boinging, and hissing sounds that came with connecting to the Internet in the early days, hold onto those memories — AOL just announced that its dial-up is about to hang up forever.
The company released a statement on Friday, which read: “AOL routinely evaluates its products and services and has decided to discontinue Dial-up Internet.”
The service and all associated software will stop working on September 30, 2025, the company added.
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Wait, AOL dial-up service has been available all this time? That’s a valid question, and the answer is shockingly yes. The New York Times, citing U.S. Census Bureau data, reports that in 2023, 163,000 United States households relied on dial-up service to access the internet. That represents just over 1 percent of all internet subscribers in the country.
The last time AOL released dial-up user numbers was in 2015, when the company reported two million users that represented $40 million a month in revenue. The company did not offer current user numbers with its closing announcement.
AOL’s dial-up service unlocked internet access for millions of users in the 1990s, and its signature “You’ve Got Mail” sign-on announcement was so iconic that it spurred a rom-com of the same name starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan as a couple who fall in love over instant messaging.
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While the closure is sure to inspire a wave of nostalgic thinkpieces about a happier time of the internet’s existence, Gen Xers should remember that the web might have seemed nicer than what we have today, but it was insanely slower. Dial-up internet speeds average about 56 kilobytes a second, reports The Times. Typical broadband connections are several thousand times faster. Think about that the next time you’re frustrated that a web page took more than half a second to load.
— ? Physical Media Forever ? (@VHSDVDBLURAY4K) August 9, 2025
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