AOL is finally shutting down its dial-up internet service after 34 years

Like Netflix sending DVDs in 2023, The Rolling Stones still touring six decades after they first formed, or Al Pacino bringing another child into the world at the age of 83, it seems hard to believe that AOL is still offering dial-up internet services in 2025. The latter of those feats is at last going offline, with the internet provider recently announcing that it will discontinue dial-up by the end of next month.

Ringing out

According to PC Gamer, the first publication to pick up the announcement from the murky depths of AOL’s online help pages, the company originally started providing dial-up internet to Americans in 1991. As recently as 2015, AOL counted as many as 1.5 million dialing customers willing to fight through shrill tones and a static wall of sound to get online, though those numbers have obviously dwindled further since. 

Still, in the age of ultrafast broadband and 5G, just how many Americans are dialing up at home to listen to Benson Boone’s new album or watch Mr Beast?

Per PC Gamer’s reporting, AOL’s dial-up service subscribers were in the “low thousands” in 2021. But there are, of course, other providers: the most recent data from the NTIA estimated that there were more than 500,000 US households still using dial-up internet services in the same year.

With streaming, social media, and artificial intelligence at every turn, it’s hard to imagine going without internet access in America in the modern world, but it’s more common than you might imagine. Data from Pew Research Center showed that some 4% of Americans polled last year said they don’t use the internet — rough math suggests that’s more than 13 million people across the country.