AOL, now operated as a Yahoo brand owned by Apollo Global Management, said it will shut down its dial-up Internet service on 30 September 2025, drawing a line under more than three decades of land-line online access. The move also eliminates the AOL Dialer application and the AOL Shield browser that were optimised for older operating systems. Announcing the decision in a support notice, the company wrote, “AOL routinely evaluates its products and services and has decided to discontinue Dial-up Internet.” The change, it added, will not affect free AOL e-mail accounts or other bundled offerings that remain part of legacy customer plans. Dial-up usage has dwindled sharply as broadband and wireless connections spread across the United States. CNBC reported in 2021 that AOL still had subscribers only in “the low thousands,” while U.S. Census Bureau data show roughly 163,000 households nationwide relied on any form of dial-up in 2023. Rural users without affordable high-speed alternatives will need to migrate to fixed-wireless, satellite or other providers before the September cutoff. Founded in 1985 and launching dial-up access in 1991, America Online reached about 25 million subscribers at its 2000 peak and became synonymous with the chime of “You’ve Got Mail.” After a ill-fated $165 billion merger with Time Warner, AOL was sold to Verizon for $4.4 billion in 2015 and later folded into Apollo-backed Yahoo. The forthcoming shutdown retires one of the consumer Internet’s earliest gateways to the Web.