The end of an era.
AOL has officially hung up the phone on its decades-spanning dial-up internet service. The corporation previously announced that these specific services would be discontinued on Tuesday, Sept. 30, 2025.
“AOL routinely evaluates its products and services and has decided to discontinue Dial-up Internet,” an update on the company’s website from this past summer reads. “This service will no longer be available in AOL plans. 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.”
AOL — formerly known as America Online — introduced many households to the web for the first time when its dial-up service launched decades ago, rising to prominence particularly in the 1990s and early 2000s, The Associated Press reports.
Who else remembers being kicked off the internet if anyone else at home needed the phone? Sure, there were frustrations that Gen X and millennials can remember firsthand — but now that dial-up is gone forever, former users are taking to social media this week to bask in the nostalgia.
“Need to hear that sound one last time,” one person commented on a recent Instagram post by Nerdist announcing the official end to dial-up — the “sound” referring to those infamous beeps and buzzes you heard when connecting to the web.
“And pour one out for my millennial homies,” another Instagram user commented on the same post.
As The AP also noted, a handful of consumers have still continued to rely on internet services connected over telephone lines. In the U.S., according to Census Bureau data, an estimated 163,401 households were using dial-up alone to get online in 2023, representing just over 0.13% of all homes with internet subscriptions nationwide.
And with Hollywood consistently broaching nostalgic territory, it shouldn’t come as a surprise if more film and TV projects surrounding the dial-up era will be released down the line.
