Who created IRC, and what was it replacing?
Jarkko Oikarinen wrote the first version in the summer of 1988, while he was working at the Department of Information Processing Science at the University of Oulu in Finland. He administered a Sun Unix machine there called tolsun.oulu.fi, which ran a public bulletin board system named OuluBox.
OuluBox already had a chat program: MultiUser Talk, usually shortened to MUT. It had one hard limit. It only worked for people logged into that one machine.
Oikarinen wanted chat that crossed machines. He wrote the relay part himself and borrowed code from two friends, Jyrki Kuoppala and Jukka Pihl, for the rest. He called the result Internet Relay Chat and deployed it at the end of August 1988. For its first weeks the entire network was a single server.
Nothing about that launch resembled a product launch. There was no company, no funding and no announcement beyond the machine it ran on. What spread was the specification. Anyone who could read it could write their own server or their own client, and within a few years people on four continents had done exactly that.
How did the Gulf War put IRC on the map?
For its first two years IRC was a tool for university staff and students who already lived on a Unix command line. Then the Gulf War started in January 1991, and people who wanted information faster than the evening news went looking for it online.
In the history of IRC compiled by Daniel Stenberg, the war is the moment the network stopped being small. Live reports circulated on IRC in early 1991, and the network passed 300 concurrent users for the first time.
Three hundred people is nothing by any modern measure. In 1991 it was a crowd, and it proved the architecture worked. Text typed on one server reached every other server on the network in near real time, with no company in the middle deciding what got through. Every text-based group chat that followed, from AOL Instant Messenger to whatever you have open in another tab right now, runs on the same premise.
Why did IRC keep splitting into rival networks?
Because anyone could run a server, and nobody could stop anyone else from running one.
The first serious fight came in August 1990 over a machine at Berkeley called eris.berkeley.edu, which accepted any connection with no password and no limit on how many. Operators who wanted limits quarantined it and called themselves the Eris Free network, which is where the name EFnet comes from. The servers that stayed with eris became A-net.
That set the pattern for the decade. Undernet split off in October 1992. DALnet forked from Undernet's server software in 1994, started by people who had already walked away from EFnet. James Ng, quoted in Stenberg's history, describes the founders as "ops in #StarTrek sick from the constant splits/lags/takeovers/etc".
The largest break came in July 1996, when a policy disagreement cut EFnet in half. The European servers, plus Australia and Japan, left to form IRCnet. The American servers kept the EFnet name. Users still call that one the Great Split. Gaming networks grew up beside them, QuakeNet out of the Quake scene, where clans arranged matches and LAN parties in channels run by bots.
Who owns IRC today, and who runs the networks?
Nobody owns IRC. It is a published protocol, not a company asset, which is the main reason it has outlived almost every commercial chat service built alongside it. What people own are individual networks: the servers, the domain names and the registered channel databases.
The largest network in 2026 is Libera.Chat, which the crawler at netsplit.de records at roughly 31,500 users and 22,500 channels. It is run by volunteer staff, funded by donations, and free to join. The older networks are still underneath it, including EFnet, IRCnet, Undernet and DALnet, each with its own server list and its own rules about bots and channel ownership.
Add the whole field together and IRC is smaller than it was, but it is not a ghost town. In April 2026 the top 100 networks tracked by netsplit.de carried more than 162,000 users at the same moment. Clients are still maintained and still free: HexChat, Irssi and WeeChat all connect to any of those networks, and mIRC still ships for Windows the way it did in 1995.
What pulled everyone else off IRC?
Two things, in order. The first was convenience. Once chat worked in a browser tab and then on a phone, installing a client, choosing a network from a list and learning slash commands became work that most people would not do. Discord arrived in the mid-2010s with the same core ideas IRC shipped in 1988, channels, direct messages and bots, wrapped in one company's servers so there was nothing to configure and nothing to split.
The second was institutional. Mozilla ran its own IRC network for more than two decades and announced in April 2019 that it was leaving for Matrix. "IRC is an ongoing source of abuse and harassment for many of our colleagues," Mike Hoye wrote in the post that explained the decision, adding that getting connected was "an unnecessary technical barrier" for anyone arriving through the web.
The numbers track that story, and they start earlier than most people assume. Pingdom counted about a million IRC users in 2003 and about 400,000 by 2012, a fall of roughly 60 percent in nine years. IRC was already shrinking before Discord existed.
How did freenode lose 90,000 users in a single year?
freenode was the network the free software world actually used, and before 2021 it advertised about 90,000 users and just under 50,000 registered channels. It had quietly changed hands in 2017, when Christel Dahlskjaer, then head of staff, incorporated it as Freenode Limited and transferred ownership to Andrew Lee, the founder of Private Internet Access, on the understanding that the network would keep running as it always had.
In May 2021 that understanding broke down. At least 14 volunteer staff resigned, describing what had happened as a hostile takeover, and founded a replacement network, Libera.Chat, on the same day. Lee disputed their account of how much they knew. "To say that staffers were unaware would be misleading," he told Vice in 2021.
Projects left in bulk, and they took their channels with them. netsplit.de now finds freenode carrying roughly 5,000 users against Libera.Chat's 31,500. The protocol survived the fight intact. The single network that mattered most to open source did not, which is the clearest illustration anyone has of what decentralization does and does not protect.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is IRC dead in 2026?
IRC is not dead. In April 2026 the top 100 IRC networks tracked by netsplit.de carried more than 162,000 users at the same time, and Libera.Chat, founded in May 2021, was the largest at roughly 31,500. IRC is a niche rather than a default now, but it has run continuously since August 1988.
How do you connect to IRC today?
Connecting to IRC in 2026 needs a client and a network address, and nothing else. HexChat, Irssi and WeeChat are free, mIRC still covers Windows, and the largest network, Libera.Chat, is free to join. There is no single IRC service to sign up for, because IRC is a protocol and every network runs its own servers.
What replaced IRC?
Discord took most of IRC's casual and gaming users after arriving in the mid-2010s, and Slack took the workplace ones. Open source projects that left IRC mostly moved to Matrix, as Mozilla did after announcing in April 2019 that it would shut its own IRC network. All three copied IRC's channels, direct messages and bots, then put them on servers a single company controls.