AOL officially pulled the plug on its dial-up internet service Tuesday, ending the screeching modem tones that once defined getting online in America.
The company quietly announced the move last month on its support page, saying it “routinely evaluates” offerings and chose to discontinue dial-up alongside its legacy software built for older operating systems. By Wednesday, dial-up vanished from AOL’s website and support pages had gone dark. (RELATED: Secretive Tech Giant Lands Historic Army Contract Worth Billions)
For millions of Americans in the 1990s and early 2000s, AOL was the first portal to the World Wide Web. Users endured the beeps and buzzes of dial-up connections, got booted offline when someone picked up the phone, and found their mailboxes stuffed with AOL’s endless promotional CDs.
Broadband and wireless service eventually pushed dial-up into obscurity, but Census Bureau data shows 163,401 U.S. households were still using it as their only internet connection in 2023, according to the Associated Press.
AOL has shut down its dial up internet service permanently. You will never be able to experience this again. pic.twitter.com/NUy8ybN31F
— AlphaFox (@Alphafox78) October 1, 2025
AOL dominated the early internet before its market value collapsed after the failed Time Warner merger. The brand changed hands several times, with Verizon eventually selling it to a private equity firm. Today, AOL operates under Yahoo.
By 2021, an anonymous source told CNBC its dial-up subscribers had dwindled to “the low thousands,” down from 2.1 million in 2015 and far from its peak decades earlier.
The shutdown mirrors other tech retirements, including Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Skype. AOL had already ended its Instant Messenger in 2017, another casualty of changing technology. The company still offers free email and tech support subscriptions, but its dial-up era is officially over.