ICQ messenger will cease its work

From June 26, the ICQ messenger will cease operations, the press service of the VK company reports .

"VK will focus on developing VK Messenger for users and corporate service based on the VK WorkSpace platform for business. ICQ employees will join the product teams to strengthen their expertise," the company said in a statement.

The ICQ messenger was created by the Israeli company Mirabilis in 1996. Then the program was bought by the American corporation AOL, and then by the DST fund. After the reorganization of the fund, ICQ became part of the Mail Group, which in 2020 decided to relaunch the messenger, called ICQ New.

The company noted that the new application placed a strong emphasis on group communication. In addition, the application supported artificial intelligence technologies - the messenger had an audio message recognition function.

Two years later, VK's press service announced a new relaunch of ICQ, but the project failed due to sanctions and the suspension of operations in Russia by a number of foreign companies. Vedomosti reported that the relaunch of the application "was discussed at the top management level of VK Group" several days before the war began.

In Russia, the application was called "ICQ" and was used for dating and business communications. Each user was assigned unique digital numbers.

Kremlin press secretary Dmitry Peskov used ICQ. At that time, the Kremlin press service notified the Kremlin pool journalists about the upcoming conference call via a chat in this messenger.

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