AOL to Unplug Its Dial-Up Internet Service After 30 Years

More than 30 years since AOL became synonymous with floppy discs and CDs offering free internet, its dial-up service has remained in operation. That all changes next month, when it will officially shut down the long-antiquated method of getting online.

“AOL routinely evaluates its products and services and has decided to discontinue Dial-up Internet. This service will no longer be available in AOL plans,” the company wrote in a statement recently posted to its website. “As a result, on September 30, 2025 this service and the associated software, the AOL Dialer software and AOL Shield browser, which are optimized for older operating systems and dial-up internet connections, will be discontinued.”

This decision could have easily been made several years ago, as The New York Times reports that, in 2023, only 163,000 households in the United States were using dial-up as their sole means of internet access. For context, that figure represents only 0.1% of internet subscriptions nationwide.

AOL began in 1983 as a company called Control Video Corporation, offering online services for the Atari 2600 video game console. It was then relaunched as Quantum Computer Services in 1985, this time offering online services first for the Commodore 64 and 128 computers and then Apple II and Macintosh computers.

In 1989, this company was renamed to America Online after parting ways with Apple. It began offering dial-up service under that name in 1991, serving as a fierce competitor to the likes of Prodigy and CompuServe.

Thanks to an advertising campaign that widely distributed floppy discs and CDs that gave access to free trials, it became the dominant dial-up service within a few years. AOL’s user base grew to 10 million by 1995 and doubled that number by 2000.

At its peak, AOL was such a part of pop culture that its new email notification sound inspired the title of Nora Ephron’s 1998 film, You’ve Got Mail, starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan.

With the rise of much faster broadband internet, however, AOL’s fortunes as a company soon dipped, thanks to an ill-advised merger with Time Warner in 2001. AOL was eventually spun off in 2009 and later bought by Verizon in 2015.

Of course, this isn’t the first AOL service that peaked in the ’90s to be discontinued. The company shuttered its instant messenger, AIM, in 2017.