ICQ

Goodbye from 101334740

ICQ started on Nov 15, 1996. That was 27 years ago as of today, in 2024. The Israeli company Mirabilis initially developed ICQ in 1996; the client was bought by AOL in 1998 and then by Mail.Ru Group in 2010.

ICQ stopped operation on Jun 26, 2024.

ICQ users have a unique UIN (User Identification Numbers), distributed in sequential order. Issued UINs started at “10,000” (5 digits) and every user receives a UIN when first registering with ICQ.

At its peak around 2001, ICQ had more than 100 million accounts registered. At the time of the Mail.Ru acquisition in 2010, there were around 42 million daily users. In 2020, the Mail.Ru Group, which owns ICQ, decided to launch new software, “ICQ New”, based on its messenger. The updated messenger was presented to the general public on April 6, 2020. In 2022, ICQ had about 11 million monthly users. (Source: Wikipedia)