AOL disables AIM service after 20 years of operation.

AOL Corporation recently announced the closure of its messenger and the termination of all its technical support. Unfortunately, one of the oldest instant messengers in the world, along with related services, will be completely disabled already on December 15. In its official appeal, the company indicates that people now have other channels of communication on the Web, and almost no one needs AIM.

“AIM helped us enter a new era of digital technology and contributed to changes in communications, but now people have other ways to communicate with each other,” wrote Michael Albers, a spokesman for Oath (a Verizon unit that owns the rights to the messenger).

AIM is short for AOL Instant Messenger , an instant messaging program that was first introduced in May 1997. The latest version of AIM has received several modern features, including IP telephony, work with the universal Plaxo notebook, the ability to send SMS via computer.

It is worth noting that AOL some time ago owned the rights to the ICQ messenger (his corporation bought it from the creators in 1998). In 2010, the owner of ICQ was the Alisher Usmanov Foundation Digital Sky Technologies. A little later, after the reorganization, this fund became part of the Mail.Ru Group, so it was to this company that all rights to the instant messenger were transferred.

In March of this year, the owners of the AIM service completely disabled the ability to work with it using other applications, which, of course, drastically reduced the number of users (there were so few of them). By the way, several years ago, in 2014, MSN Messenger was disconnected, and in 2016, Yahoo decided to turn off Yahoo Messenger, however, a new service with the same name was soon launched.

As usual, company representatives said they plan to use the resources that are released due to the closure of the messenger in other projects.