Are there any closures, While expected, they inevitably cause some regretand ICQ is among them. Of course, in all honesty, we’re again dealing with a case of the Mandela Effect, you know, the shared belief that someone or something has died in the past when in fact it’s still alive and well in the future. . present, present. And something strange about the Mandela effect is that in many cases we don’t realize our mistakes until actual death occurs.

A few days ago I mentioned what’s new in Windows 11 24H2 a clear example of the Mandela effect in the digital worldand today there are still Windows installations with Cortana. Yes, the failed digital assistant, while defunct, is still present on some systems. Now, this is nothing compared to what concerns us in this report, and it will come as a complete surprise to many to know that at the end of May 2024, ICQ is still functional.

Now, confirming what I mentioned at the beginning about the Mandela Effect, this revelation about his survival comes hand in hand with his farewell, and that is that those responsible have confirmed that ICQ will be closed for good on June 26. And as a recommendation to all its current users, we can read «You can chat with friends in VK Messenger and with colleagues in VK WorkSpace«, that is, they invite them to migrate to the services of VK, a popular social network of Russian origin (it was created by Pavel Durov, the creator of Telegram), which has deep roots in Russia and its surroundings.

ICQ is a service completely unknown to young people, but between the end of the last century and the first decade of the present, it gained quite a lot of popularity, competing with the giants of that time, such as Microsoft Messenger. However, as is common in the history of online services, its market share in a large part of the world gradually declined, although it managed to remain one of the reference services in Russia, where it still has a significant number of users today. And yes, indeed, this is the reason why those responsible recommend their users to migrate to VK.

The closure of ICQ is another example, as I mentioned earlier, that success at a particular moment is no guarantee of persistence, and also a reminder that The Internet as we knew it in the late 1990s and early 2000s is now just a handful of memories well seasoned with nostalgia. Yahoo!, Messenger, IRC (even though it’s still alive actually), FTP repositories, seeing the picture load bit by bit… oh how we get old with time.