Who owns Yahoo Messenger today?
Nobody runs it. Yahoo Messenger stopped working on July 17, 2018, and the company that switched it off was Oath, the Verizon division that held Yahoo at the time.
Yahoo itself changed hands three years later. Apollo Global Management completed its purchase of Yahoo on September 1, 2021 in a deal valued at about $5 billion, with Verizon keeping a 10 percent stake, and Yahoo has operated as a standalone company under Apollo since.
Apollo bought the brand, the mail product, the finance and sports sites and the search business. It did not buy a chat service, because by then there was not one to buy. Yahoo's only attempt at a successor, Yahoo Together, had closed on April 4, 2019.
So the trademark has an owner and the product has no server. An old Yahoo Messenger installer still runs on Windows and still fails at the login screen, which is where every build has stopped since 2018.
What was Yahoo Messenger before it was Yahoo Messenger?
It was Yahoo Pager, released on March 9, 1998. The program's whole job was to tell a user when a friend signed on and when new Yahoo Mail arrived.
Yahoo renamed it Yahoo Messenger in 1999, the year it added voice chat, once naming internet software after pager hardware started to look dated. The name then held for 19 years.
The timing mattered. AOL Instant Messenger had launched in May 1997 and owned the American teenage buddy list, but Yahoo already ran mail, search, finance, games and fantasy sports, and it wired the chat client into all of them.
Yahoo Messenger was also the front door to Yahoo Chat, the public topic rooms that would hand the company its worst publicity of the decade.
Why did people pick Yahoo Messenger over AIM?
Yahoo competed on personality rather than reach. Yahoo Messenger 6.0, released in 2004, pulled Yahoo Games, music, photos and search into the messaging window and introduced Yahoo Avatars, the cartoon stand-ins users dressed up and kept on their profile.
The same release brought Audibles, short voice animations fired at a contact mid-conversation, and stealth settings, which let a user appear offline to specific people on the list rather than to everyone. Two decades before read receipts became a social problem, Yahoo Messenger shipped the tool for avoiding one.
IMVironments came earlier, in version 5.0: themed chat backgrounds that played music and video clips behind a conversation.
Then there was Buzz. Pressing it shook the recipient's window and played a sound, and it existed for one purpose, which was getting the attention of someone who had stopped answering. MSN Messenger had its own nudge, and Yahoo's is the one people still imitate out loud.
What happened to Yahoo chat rooms?
Advertisers ended them. In May 2005 the Houston television station KPRC reported that Yahoo carried user-created chat rooms with names such as "Girls 13 And Under For Older Guys", and that national brand advertising was running against them.
PepsiCo, Georgia-Pacific and State Farm pulled their spots. "We were horrified to find out we were on those sites," Georgia-Pacific spokeswoman Robin Keegan told ABC News in 2005, adding that the company still advertised on other parts of Yahoo.
Yahoo closed every user-created room in June 2005 and blocked users from making new ones. Spokeswoman Mary Osako said the rooms, and the ability to create them, had been shut off "in the past week", while the rooms Yahoo ran itself stayed open.
Those lasted another seven years. Yahoo discontinued its public chat rooms on December 14, 2012, and the chat.yahoo.com address went with them. It was the second time Yahoo treated part of Yahoo Messenger as a liability rather than an asset, and it would not be the last.
Did the Microsoft and Yahoo messaging truce work?
On October 12, 2005 Yahoo and Microsoft announced the first interoperability agreement between two major consumer instant messaging networks, letting Yahoo Messenger and MSN Messenger users add each other as contacts.
Their joint announcement put the combined community at "more than 275 million strong", which the two companies expected to make it the largest consumer instant messaging community in the world.
The engineering took longer than the press release suggested. The companies planned the link for the second quarter of 2006 and switched it on in the middle of that year.
What the deal did not include was AOL. The two companies chasing AOL Instant Messenger connected to each other and left the market leader outside, which is a fair summary of how instant messaging worked before phones ate the category. The link ran until December 14, 2012, when Yahoo dropped Windows Live Messenger interoperability on the same day it closed the public chat rooms.
Why did Yahoo shut Yahoo Messenger down twice?
The first shutdown came on August 5, 2016, when Yahoo retired the legacy desktop client and the interface third-party apps used to reach it. Anyone still running the old Windows program, or connecting through a client such as Trillian, lost the service that summer.
Yahoo had rebuilt Messenger in 2015 as a mobile and web app with unsend and animated images, aimed at people who had already moved to WhatsApp and group texts. It did not bring them back, and it is the version that died two years later.
On June 8, 2018, Oath announced the real ending. Yahoo Messenger would stop working on July 17, 2018, a little over 20 years after Yahoo Pager shipped.
"We know we have many loyal fans who have used Yahoo Messenger since its beginning as one of the first chat apps of its kind", the company wrote, adding that it was focusing on "new, exciting communications tools that better fit consumer needs". The help pages were blunter: "There currently isn't a replacement product available for Yahoo Messenger". Users had six months to export their chat history, and conversations nobody downloaded in that window are gone, which is the part of this story that still annoys people who used Yahoo Messenger for a decade.
Frequently Asked Questions
When did Yahoo Messenger shut down?
Yahoo Messenger shut down on July 17, 2018, a little over 20 years after it launched as Yahoo Pager on March 9, 1998. Oath, the Verizon division that owned Yahoo at the time, announced the closure on June 8, 2018 and gave users six months to download their chat history before the service went dark.
What replaced Yahoo Messenger?
Nothing from Yahoo. When Yahoo Messenger closed on July 17, 2018, Yahoo pointed users at Squirrel, an invite-only group chat app still in testing, which was renamed Yahoo Together in October 2018 and shut down on April 4, 2019. Yahoo has run no instant messaging product since.
Can you still download Yahoo Messenger?
No. Yahoo stopped offering Yahoo Messenger downloads before the July 17, 2018 shutdown, and the legacy desktop client had already stopped connecting on August 5, 2016. Hobby projects have revived servers for other dead chat networks, but Yahoo runs no Yahoo Messenger server and there is no sanctioned client.