What was ICQ and who built it?
ICQ was a free instant messenger written by Mirabilis, a small Israeli company set up in 1996 by Yair Goldfinger, Sefi Vigiser, Amnon Amir and Arik Vardi. Arik's father, the investor Yossi Vardi, put up the money. The first client went out as a free download in November 1996.
The name is a phonetic spelling of the phrase I Seek You, and the problem it solved sounds trivial now. In 1996 you could only chat with people inside the same walled service. CompuServe members talked to CompuServe members. AOL members talked to AOL members. Everyone else had IRC, which assumed you already knew what a server and a channel were.
ICQ ignored the walls. Download the client, take a number, add anyone you liked anywhere on the internet. It shipped with a contact list, online and away status, offline messages that waited for you to come back, file transfers and a searchable directory of users. Every one of those features is in the messenger on your phone right now, which is the strongest argument for treating ICQ as the original rather than an also-ran.
Why did AOL pay $287 million for a free chat app?
By the spring of 1998, America Online had a problem. Its own AOL Instant Messenger mattered only inside AOL's service. ICQ had everyone else, and it was spreading with no advertising at all.
So AOL bought Mirabilis outright. AOL's filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission records that the purchase closed on June 5, 1998, that AOL paid $287 million in cash for 100 percent of the Mirabilis assets, and that it agreed to contingent payments of up to $120 million over three years tied to growth targets. That is about $407 million if everything paid out, and at the time it was the largest sum ever paid for an Israeli software company.
The same filing counts more than 12 million registered ICQ users at the moment of sale. "The acquisition of ICQ technology dramatically increases our presence on the Web," AOL chairman and chief executive Steve Case said in the 1998 announcement. Mirabilis stayed in Tel Aviv, still run by its founders, and ICQ kept its own name and its own client.
What made an ICQ number worth bragging about?
Every account got a Unique Identification Number, the UIN. It was your address on the network, independent of the computer you sat at, the internet provider you paid or the country you lived in. Type the number and the password anywhere and your contact list followed you. That is ordinary in 2026 and it was not ordinary in 1996.
Because the numbers were handed out in order, the length of yours announced when you had arrived. Six-digit UINs belonged to people who signed up in the first year. Nine-digit numbers marked you as late. Short numbers were traded, gifted and sold, years before anyone thought of a handle as property.
The other signature was the alert sound, a two-note chime that played the moment a message landed. It is still the first thing people name when ICQ comes up, and it is the reason the shutdown in 2024 made headlines in countries where the service had been dead for a decade.
How did ICQ lose the messaging war?
ICQ kept growing after the sale. Its peak was around 100 million users in 2001, which made it one of the most widely installed programs on earth. Then three things went wrong at once.
AOL owned two messengers and never chose between them. AOL Instant Messenger was the default for American members. ICQ was everything outside the United States. The engineering attention went to the American product, and ICQ drifted.
The client also got heavy. A program that had been small and quick filled up with news tickers, mini games, greeting cards, a browser toolbar and advertising. Meanwhile MSN Messenger was free, plain, tied to a Hotmail address and, on Windows XP, already sitting on the machine when the user first switched it on.
Then phones arrived. ICQ's identity was a number you had to memorise and a client you had to install. WhatsApp's identity was the phone number already in your pocket, and it was drawn for a phone screen from its first release. By the time ICQ had a mobile app worth using, the contacts had moved and there was nothing to come back for.
Who owns ICQ today?
VK Company Limited, the Russian internet group formerly called Mail.ru Group, owns the ICQ name in 2026 and has owned it since 2010.
AOL sold the service on. AOL's 2010 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission records a securities purchase agreement signed on April 28, 2010 with Digital Sky Technologies Limited, and a price of $187.5 million in cash. AOL had paid $287 million twelve years earlier, so the messenger sold for well under what it cost before inflation is counted at all.
Digital Sky Technologies became Mail.ru Group, and Mail.ru Group later renamed itself VK Company Limited after VKontakte, its largest product. Under that ownership ICQ stopped being a world product and became a Russian one. It was rebuilt more than once, gaining video calls, stickers and a redesigned mobile app, and it held a real audience in Russia and its neighbours long after the rest of the world had forgotten the chime. That audience was not enough.
Can you still log into ICQ in 2026?
Not on VK's servers. In late May 2024 a notice went up on the ICQ website: "ICQ will stop working from June 26." It gave no explanation and sent people to VK Messenger for friends and VK WorkSpace for colleagues. The service went dark on June 26, 2024, twenty-eight years after the first download, and VK has run nothing under the name since.
Unofficial servers kept the protocol alive. NINA, a volunteer project that also rebuilds AOL Instant Messenger and classic AOL, runs ICQ servers that the original clients connect to: point an old client at login.oscar.nina.chat on port 5190 and it logs in. NINA covers ICQ 2000a through the 8.x releases, describes its ICQ support as a beta still under work, and charges nothing. A separate MIT-licensed project, Open OSCAR Server, reimplements the same protocol in Go for anyone who would rather run their own. NINA does the same job for Yahoo Messenger, which is how most of these dead messengers are reachable at all.
Frequently Asked Questions
When did ICQ shut down?
ICQ shut down on June 26, 2024, twenty-eight years after its first release in November 1996. VK, the Russian company that had owned the messenger since 2010, posted a notice in late May 2024 saying the service would stop working and directing users to VK Messenger and VK WorkSpace.
Who owns ICQ now?
VK Company Limited, formerly Mail.ru Group, has owned ICQ since Digital Sky Technologies bought it from AOL for $187.5 million under an agreement signed in April 2010. VK still holds the ICQ brand in 2026, but it has operated no ICQ service since June 26, 2024.
What does ICQ stand for?
ICQ is not an abbreviation. Mirabilis named the messenger in 1996 with a phonetic spelling of the phrase I Seek You, which described what the program did: find other people anywhere on the internet and message them directly, without both sides paying for the same online service.