AOL’s Dial-Up Internet Is Officially Dead. Yes, It Was Still Around.

Well, AOL’s dial-up internet service outlasted Skype. Who had that one on their bingo card for 2025? AOL, or America Online as it was known by people who had time for all those syllables in the go-go ’90s, was the service that gently coaxed a nation online.

It may seem quaint now, but most people had never had to figure out how to get online. They didn’t grow up with the knowledge, and it was also a little trickier back in the ’90s than it is now. And before broadband internet took over, you had to get online through a phone land line.

It was called dial-up internet, and after September 30, AOL is finally heaving it out onto the curb and discontinuing support of dial-up over AOL, in much the way that most of us did so two decades ago.

For those who want a blast of nostalgia, or those who never had to listen to the hideous, angry lizard screech of logging online over dial-up internet, check out the video below. But make sure your volume isn’t blaring, or else don’t say I didn’t warn you.

RIP to AOL

“The creaky door to the internet was characterized by a once-ubiquitous series of beeps and buzzes heard over the phone used to connect your computer online—along with frustrations of being kicked off the web if anyone else at home needed the landline for another call, and an endless bombardment of CDs mailed out by AOL to advertise free trials,” wrote the Associated Press on August 11.

Aside from making me chuckle to hear AOL referred to as a creaky door, it reminded me of how pervasive and omnipresent AOL was in the late 1990s and early 2000s. I remember those CDs. They were everywhere.

Even when my friends and I would bike over to Burger King as teenagers, they’d shove those AOL free trial CDs across the counter at us. And then we’d use them for paintball gun target practice, which was more useful than the vast numbers of them that probably went straight into landfills.

Yet as of 2023, the US Census Bureau’s data showed about 163,000 people in the US still used dial-up to access the internet.

“AOL routinely evaluates its products and services and has decided to discontinue Dial-up Internet. This service will no longer be available in AOL plans,” wrote AOL, now owned by Yahoo!, in a very (very) brief post on the help section of its website, rather than a press release. It’s a very AOL thing to do, to be honest.

“As a result,” the post continued, “on September 30, 2025, this service and the associated software, the AOL Dialer software and AOL Shield browser, which are optimized for older operating systems and dial-up internet connections, will be discontinued. This change will not affect any other benefits in your AOL plan, which you can access any time on your AOL plan dashboard…”

AOL will march on, doing whatever it is that it’s doing. Only it won’t be over dial-up after September 2025 closes out.