From “8,000,000 Subscribers”
to “Service stopped working”

The oldest capture of the messenger’s homepage we use is dated February 24, 1998. The masthead and many small images are missing in our replay, so what’s left is a dense page of links on yellow, white and black. The browser tab says ICQ - World's Largest Internet Online Communication Network. The counter line at the top says 02/22/98 - 8,000,000 Subscribers, and an ICQ Records box adds 2.1 MILLION USING ICQ DAILY.

Your ICQ number was your identity, and the first box on the left is built around it: a people search that promises to Find our users' e-mail, ICQ# and more. According to CNA’s look back, every registered user got a unique number, the numbers grew longer as more people joined, and friends added each other by number.^[1]

“Uh oh!” was the sound of a new message, and CNA counts it among the things early users still recall fondly.^[1] Our stills can’t play it.

The footer reads Copyright ©1996 Mirabilis LTD. CNA dates the launch of ICQ by Mirabilis, an Israeli company, to November 1996.^[1] A section titled To Our New Users - Circulating Chain-Letters explains that with tens of thousands of new ones each day, some users always meet the rumors for the first time.

Right under the warning comes a note about money. The Time Limited Free Beta software policy had not changed, the page says, and any change would come with an advance notice of at least 30 days.

On June 8, 1998, AOL announced it was buying Mirabilis. Wired reported $287 million in cash for the whole company, plus payments of up to $120 million more starting in fiscal 2001, which is where the round figure of about $400 million comes from. The same article put ICQ at an estimated 12 million users.^[2]

The February 4, 1999 capture is lighter: a blue sidebar, a cream middle and a banner that says Make ICQ sing for you. The logo is a globe with little human figures. The chain-letter section has turned into a joke with a diagnosis, For CFS (Compulsive Forwarding Syndrome) see this. The free-beta paragraph is still there, lightly reworded.

The new worry is fake software. ICQ is currently testing the next version of its software, ICQ99a, the page says; until then, use ICQ98a, downloaded from an approved download site only (Download.com, Tucows, ZDNet and Jumbo), because software from anywhere else may have been altered and could cause harm.

The people search has grown, too. The link list offers a Family and Lost Relatives Finder, a Game Request - Find a game partner, a Birthday Center and, in the What’s New column, a line that reads oddly today: Find an ICQ User's phone number!

By August 15, 2000 the homepage lives at web.icq.com and is a yellow-and-lime portal with an icon bar: ICQmail, Homepages, People&Chat, Shopping, Greetings, Your Language, ICQphone. On the left a sticker says Now in your language Get ICQ for Free, and under it a counter reads 74,142,101 with the label ICQ Users Around the World.

The language sticker isn’t an exaggeration. What’s New lists the translations: Chinese, Portuguese, Swedish, Spanish, German, French, Hebrew, Japanese, Italian and Russian. Another item says the messenger now works behind a firewall!, and a third launches ICQ Storyboards for writing epic online stories.

The Decision Guides ask, Have a date but don't know what to do? Buying a DVD? Looking for the perfect pet? The code carries its own timestamp: Vignette StoryServer 5.0 Mon Aug 14 11:19:52 2000, the day before the capture.

The June 10, 2001 page swaps yellow for lavender. Its promos read like a calendar of that week: Tomb Raider on ICQ! Lara Croft comes alive!, the NBA Finals and Father’s Day. A music search is named after the pun in ICQ’s name, I Seek Music!

The old warning has shrunk to one line in a list of links: Chain letters - learn the truth about them. By 2001 ICQ had at least 100 million registered users.^[1][3]

The June 5, 2002 capture has a new logo, ICQ.com in blue with a tagline under it: ICQ is Online Happiness. The browser tab is now just ICQ.com. A yellow bar under the menu brags, ICQ is the first ever to reach 200,000,000 downloads on CNET!

The boxes show where ICQ was going. Exchange ICQ SMS in Any Language, Covering over 180 cellular networks worldwide. Use Your ICQ at Work! Stop Spammers! A tip says Ctrl+Enter will send your ICQ messages.

The ICQ Wedding Album has Over 180 couples who share their ICQ love stories. We blurred the couple’s photo next to it.

The owner is in the small print. The footer reads Copyright ©1998-2002 ICQ Inc., the name it has carried since 1999, and lower down the page advertises the parent company’s own service: All-New AOL 7.0 - 1000 Hours FREE for 45 days! The page’s script, meanwhile, still remembers you by number: a function called EnterICQ reads a cookie named uin to fill in your ICQ number.

On December 2, 2003 the globe is gone. The logo is a flower with green petals and one red one, next to a lowercase icq. ICQ users knew that flower from the contact list: one of them told CNA that seeing so many people online with the characteristic green flower made him feel part of a community.^[1] A promo for "LOTR: The Return of the King" dates the page to that winter.

Next to the heading ICQ Friends & Interest Sites sits a small box: INTERNET TIME on the left, @563 on the right. In June 2004 it says swatch and @462. The number isn’t frozen. A script called SwatchInternetTime takes the visitor’s clock, moves it to UTC+1 and cuts the day into 1,000 beats, updating every ten seconds, so both stills show the moment our browser opened the replay.

In the bottom corner, a box called ICQ User Stories has a photo and a caption. In 2003 it’s a couple that fell in love thru ICQ! In June 2004 it’s Meet Jere & Yi, they met on ICQ & just got married in May. Congrats! Their photos are blurred here, and so are the 2003 couple’s names.

The 2004 page keeps the 2003 layout and updates the rest: a Download Now! banner for ICQ 4 Lite edition, new promos, and ICQ Dating where ICQ Match used to be.

The June 15, 2005 homepage has purple section bars and an orange Download ICQ 5 button, and its tab drops the instant messenger from the pitch: ICQ.com - community, people search and messaging service! The first promo is ICQ Dating: If you're looking to meet someone or just flirt, find ICQ singles from all over the world right here! The second is Push-to-Talk, to talk in walkie-talkie style to all your buddies.

The heading above them is dated by a script, and in our replay it reads Today in ICQ community - June 15, 105. The same 105 shows up under Newest Xtraz. The script lives in a file this capture doesn’t include, but a year that comes out 1,900 short is the classic sign of an old date call that counts from 1900. The User Stories box has one more couple, Ana and William, a couple that met on ICQ & getting married soon!

The December 1, 2006 capture is the loudest page in this collection: a huge green ribbon sweeps behind everything, and the logo wears a badge for ICQ’s tenth anniversary next to the slogan everybody, everywhere. The tabs read Home, Download, People Search, Dating, Groups, Chat, Forums, Games, Greetings and Help. The People Search promo, Find friends from the past, or make new ones with our optimized search., offers Search in Slovakia in this archived copy, with France and Russia as Other Top Countries.

The right column, ICQ Users, shows real members with a flag and an age. We blurred them. The left column, ICQ Products, lists eight items, from ICQ 5.1 and ICQ2Go! to ICQ Pro 2003b and ICQ Labs.

The June 13, 2007 page keeps the ribbon and the slogan. The anniversary badge is gone. The hero says ICQ 6 is Here! beside a pink splash that reads icq6 it's your show, the game of the day is Sudoku Titans, and the footer still says ICQ Inc.

In June 2008 the homepage is a set of green tiles on a blue ornamental background, with a Download ICQ 6 panel in orange and a round badge for ICQ Tips for Safety Online. One tile, Group Hug, says Feeling lonely? You don’t have to! Sometimes all you need is someone to talk with. The browser tab still reads ICQ.com - community, people search and messaging service!, but the copyright line has changed to ICQ LLC.

The most interesting tile is a tag cloud called People write about..., built from members’ blogs. In 2008 it mixes English with German: Liebe, verloren, wiederherstellen. A year later Cyrillic has joined it, Россия among them. The member blogs and group posts below it are blurred in our stills.

The 2009 code shows how international ICQ’s audience had become. The image descriptions include Deutsche Version von ICQ2Go! und ProSieben and Deutsche Version von ICQ 6.5 und N24, two German partner editions, and one written in Hebrew: מידע, ייעוץ ותמיכה לנוער וצעירים, information, advice and support for teenagers and young adults. The Popular Searches box lists Beach resorts, Compare travel insurance, Find a hotel and Money transfers.

The June 16, 2010 capture keeps the tiles and promotes ICQ 7. Its browser tab is a plain invitation: Communicate and find new friends on ICQ. One tile is for the World Cup: Get your ICQ7 looking cool! Download our new soccer skins just in time for the World Cup:) Popular Searches has become iPhone 4, T Shirts prints, Cheap flights, Dolce Gabbana and Cookies recipes.

Three weeks later, on July 8, 2010, AOL completed the sale of ICQ to Digital Sky Technologies, later renamed Mail.ru Group, for $187.5 million in cash, subject to working-capital adjustments.^[4] It looks like a loss next to the 1998 price, but AOL’s accounts didn’t say so: its results recorded a pre-tax gain of $119.6 million on the sale, later reduced by an estimated loss.^[4] The same filing says a US government committee, CFIUS, was reviewing the completed sale.^[4]

The 2011 homepage is a different site. It moves to icq.com/en, loses the tiles and leads with a big green banner for audio and video calls. The tab says Download ICQ 7.5 – the latest ICQ version, the download box says Version 7.5 for Windows (12.4 MB), and under More Fun on ICQ the Android app comes with a promise: Download ICQ Mobile for Android and chat with ICQ and Facebook friends from your mobile phone. In the code, a script labeled LiveInternet counter now reports each visit to counter.yadro.ru. None of the AOL-era captures have it.

From 2012 the browser tab says what the page is for: Download ICQ for mobile and switch from costly SMS to FREE messaging! The June 2012 hero is ICQ Messenger for Android, and the platform menu lists nine: iPhone Android Symbian BlackBerry Java Windows Mobile Mobile Web-Chat Windows Phone 7 Bada.

The December 2013 capture shows a photo hero for free calls from any device, and a feature list in the code promises chats with Facebook, VKontakte, Odnoklassniki, two of them Russian social networks. In June 2014 an iPhone and a group of friends promote free texting in the app or by SMS. The same tab title runs through all three captures.

In June 2015 the homepage turns pale and quiet. A row of platform icons sits on top, and the Windows client is offered with one green button and a file size, Version 8.3. File size: 34Mb. The tab: ICQ with video calls, free messages and low-cost phone calls. In the page’s code, the sign-in form has a phone-number field, and its hidden list of country codes starts with Russia: ru | +7 | Russia, then Germany, the USA and Ukraine.

From 2016 to 2019 the captured address is the Windows page, icq.com/windows/en. Its top stays the same: New ICQ for Windows, a laptop or a chat window, and the line Simple way to communicate and nothing extra. The panels below change, and in 2017 and 2018 one of them promises something that matters later: Easily convert voice messages to text when you would rather read them.

The small print tells the rest. In 2017 the footer says Copyright © 1998-2017 ICQ LLC; in 2018 it says Copyright © 1998-2018 LLC Mail.Ru. The cookie notice is hidden in our stills, but its code in 2018 and 2019 says You can read our Сookie Policy here, and the C of Cookie is a Cyrillic letter that looks exactly like the Latin one.

The June 2020 homepage is black. The logo is a five-petal flower in bright green beside icq new, and the headline pairs ICQ New with stay connected. Under it: Convert audio messages to text, use smart replies, stay online even with bad internet connection. The big green button says Download for Ubuntu. The page’s script picks the download from the browser that opens it, so the button reflects the browser that ran our replay.

Mail.ru Group had released the revamped app as ICQ New in April 2020, with better transcription of voice messages, group calls, quick replies and a platform for building bots.^[5] Meduza reported that group calls went from five people to 30.^[6] The voice-to-text line from the 2017 Windows page now sits right under the headline.

The 2021 and 2022 captures look the same in English, but their code describes the page in Russian. The share title calls ICQ New the messenger для тех, кто всегда онлайн, “for those who are always online”. In June 2023 the word New is gone: the tab says ICQ – stay connected, the flower is teal, and the address ends in #windows.

ICQ shut down on June 26, 2024.^[1][3] Our October 1, 2024 capture is black, with an Eng language menu in the corner and two lines in the middle: Service stopped working, then the split between VK Messenger for friends and VK WorkSpace for colleagues. The tab says just ICQ. The 2025 and 2026 captures are the same page, the last one at an address ending in #linux.

Plenty of people still carry the number. When the shutdown was announced, PC Gamer’s Andy Chalk wrote that he remembered his ICQ number, 1302192, and was still in the user database, though the password and the recovery e-mail were long gone.^[7] A user who met friends on ICQ in 1999 told CNA that 25 years on he still keeps in touch with many of them, on other platforms.^[1]

1998 · 8,000,000 Subscribers1998 · 8 million2024 · Service stopped2024 · Stopped

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In 1998 the first box on icq.com offered to find its users’ e-mail addresses and ICQ numbers. The last homepage has no search box at all. It only suggests where to talk to your friends now.