The company is not specific about its reasons for shutting down Messenger, but the writing has been on the wall for some time, given the dominance today of Facebook’s WhatsApp and Messenger, Snapchat, WeChat and a number of others. Notably, Oath also shut down AIM, AOL’s equivalent messaging app, in October. The company says your Yahoo ID remains intact for other services like Mail and fantasy sports. Cumulatively over the last 20 years, hundreds of millions of people have used the service, the company said.

Yahoo has not broken out active users of Messenger for some time, and theoretically anyone logged into any Yahoo property is logged into Messenger. “We’re constantly experimenting with new services and apps, one of which is an invite-only group messaging app called Yahoo Squirrel (currently in beta).” Squirrel is a group messaging app Yahoo started testing last month. “There currently isn’t a replacement product available for Yahoo Messenger,” the company writes. Today, Oath (which also owns TechCrunch) announced that it would be winding down the service on July 17 as it continues to experiment and consider how and if it can have a relevant place in the messaging landscape amid huge domination from Facebook and others in mobile apps. It’s the end of an era for Yahoo Messenger, one of the first instant messaging apps on the market.

Shutdown messenger