You got disconnected: AOL ditches 1990s relic and ends its dial-up internet service

AOL is killing its dial-up internet.

First introduced commercially in 1989 and made largely obsolescent in the 2000s by the spread of broadband, the company perhaps most associated with the technology will now stop offering it.

It remains unclear how many people are on such connections and why they might be using it.

In 2015, AOL’s dial-up service was being used by 2.1 million people. But CNBC reported in 2021 that the number was then in the “low thousands.”

The 2021 census in the U.S. found that 163,000 people were using dial-up, around 1 percent of the country’s population.

AOL is killing off its dial-up internet service. (Getty Images)

While it was slow and required connecting with specialised equipment that made the beeps and boops that are associated with the early Internet, dial-up allows users to connect using a traditional phone connection. That allowed it to be introduced in homes without special wiring, and may still provide a connection for homes that are yet to receive proper broadband connections.

Now, however, AOL says that it has “decided to discontinue Dial-up Internet”. It gave no explanation and posted the announcement in a relatively obscure help page on its website.

The service will end on 30 September it said. At the same time it will end support for the associated software that it offers, noting the they were “optimised for older operating systems and dial-up internet connections.

In the U.S., AOL – previously known as America Online – is largely associated with those early days of the internet and the dial-up technology that underpinned it. But it has gone through a number of mergers and acquisitions in the years since, and is now part of Yahoo.