A brief history of IRC: from OuluBox to Libera.Chat

Few pieces of internet infrastructure from the 1980s are still in daily use. IRC is one of them. Here is how it happened, in brief.

1988: Oulu, Finland #

Jarkko "WiZ" Oikarinen, working at the University of Oulu, wrote IRC in August 1988 to replace a multi-user talk program on a local BBS called OuluBox. The design — servers relaying text between clients, channels prefixed with # — spread first to Finnish universities, then across the academic internet.

The 1990s: growth and the great splits #

IRC hit the news in 1991, when users live-reported the Soviet coup attempt and the Gulf War while traditional lines were cut. Growth brought governance fights, and governance fights brought forks: EFnet emerged from the original network, Undernet (1992) and DALnet (1994) split off with new ideas — DALnet introducing the registration services that most networks use to this day — and in 1996 the European servers broke from EFnet to form IRCnet. QuakeNet (1997) rode the online gaming wave to become, for a time, the largest chat network in the world.

The 2000s: peak and decline #

The early 2000s were the peak: QuakeNet alone exceeded 240,000 simultaneous users around 2004, and total IRC usage approached a million. Then came the slide — first social media, later Slack and Discord — and between 2003 and 2012 IRC lost about 60% of its users. What remained concentrated around open source: Freenode, founded in the 90s as a hub for free software, became the default home of nearly every project channel.

2021: the Freenode collapse #

In May 2021 a dispute over Freenode's ownership ended with the volunteer staff resigning en masse and founding Libera.Chat. Within weeks, the open source world — Ubuntu, FSF/GNU, Wikimedia and hundreds of others — migrated, in the fastest mass move in IRC history. The full story is its own article, and its lesson is the protocol's lesson: communities on an open protocol can pick up and leave.

Today #

IRC in 2026 is stable rather than shrinking: over 160,000 concurrent users on the top networks, an active standards effort (IRCv3), new server and client software, and channels that have now run continuously for more than three decades. Not bad for a summer project from 1988.