You have to be of a certain age to even know what ICQ is. Don't worry, we do too. It was one of the pioneers of online messaging, taking on the likes of AIM and Yahoo Messenger many, many years ago (remember those?) and you might have thought it was long dead. We know we did. But no.
Somehow, ICQ has (if you say it out loud, it makes sense – it sounds like “I'm looking for you”, which may feel scary now, but that wasn't in 1996 when it launched) and still exists. But not for long. It will stop working on June 26. RIP.
ICQ was bought by AOL in 1998 and by the Mail.Ru Group (now UK) in 2010. Since it's still owned by VK, the company suggests that starting June 26, you use VK Messenger to chat with friends and VK WorkSpace to talk to your colleagues. further.
At its peak around 2001, ICQ had over 100 million registered accounts (which was a much larger number then than it is today, considering how many people had access to the Internet then versus now). According to Wikipedia, ICQ still had approximately 11 million monthly active users in 2022. Probably not anymore.
AIM was killed in December 2017 and Yahoo Messenger died in 2019. And now another of the big names in the IM space from two decades ago is leaving. We're all the better for it, of course, with WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger and Telegram and iMessage and all the rest of the services we use today being far superior to ICQ and the like.