Internet Relay Chat was created in 1988 by Jarkko Oikarinen at the University of Oulu in Finland. The protocol he designed and the network that grew up around it has been continuously operating for nearly four decades. IRC is not the dominant chat platform anymore — it has not been since well before the rise of Slack and Discord — but it remains operationally important to several technical communities and its design has influenced almost every chat platform that followed it.

The origins.

Oikarinen was working at the University of Oulu’s computing centre in 1988 and developed IRC to extend a local-only bulletin board system into a multi-user real-time chat that could span across networks. The early implementation was rough but the design choices Oikarinen made set the template for decades of similar systems.

The IRC protocol was simple. Servers connected to other servers in a tree topology. Users connected to a server. Messages were routed through the server tree. Channels were named with a leading # character. Users could send private messages directly. Operators had administrative privileges on channels and on the server. The whole protocol was text-based and could be read by humans inspecting the network traffic.

Through 1988 and 1989 IRC spread across European university networks and into US universities. By 1990 it was running on networks across the world.

The first major event.

The 1991 Gulf War was the first major event where IRC played a public role. Users on the Mideast University of Kuwait connection broadcast real-time updates as the situation in Kuwait developed. The relay of those updates across IRC was one of the first instances of real-time citizen reporting on the global internet and it brought IRC to wider attention.

Through the early 1990s IRC continued to grow. New networks formed. EFnet (the original network) was joined by IRCnet (after a 1996 split), Undernet (founded in 1992), DALnet (founded in 1994), and many others. The major networks each had their own server policy, their own administrative culture, and their own user communities.

The protocol stability.

The RFC 1459 specification of IRC was published in 1993. RFC 2810-2813 updated the specification in 2000. The remarkable property of the IRC protocol is that it has remained substantially backwards-compatible for over three decades. An IRC client written in 1995 can still connect to a major IRC network in 2026 and basic functionality will work.

This stability has been both a strength and a limitation. The protocol is well-understood, the implementations are mature, and the operational behaviour is predictable. But the protocol does not support features that modern users expect — persistent message history, message editing and deletion, voice and video, large file transfers, threaded conversations, or much of the social fabric that newer chat platforms provide.

The peak years.

IRC peaked in the early-to-mid 2000s in terms of active users. The estimates from that era suggest several million concurrent users across all networks at peak times. The cultural significance was particularly strong in technical communities, open-source projects, gaming communities, and online subcultures.

The role in open source software development was particularly significant. Most major open-source projects through the 1990s and 2000s ran their development discussion on IRC. Linux kernel development, the Debian project, the Apache Foundation projects, Perl, Python, Ruby — all had active IRC presence. The pattern of asynchronous-then-real-time conversation between contributors who never met in person was largely defined by IRC.

The decline.

IRC began declining as a mainstream platform through the mid-2000s. The reasons were multiple. The user experience of an IRC client was demanding by the standards of newer platforms. The lack of persistent history meant that users who were not online during important conversations missed them entirely. The absence of mobile clients (in the era before serious smartphone messaging) was a structural limitation. The growth of web-based alternatives — first AOL Instant Messenger, then MSN Messenger, eventually Skype and Slack — pulled mainstream users to platforms that were operationally easier.

Through the 2010s the move accelerated. Slack launched in 2013 and rapidly became the dominant platform for company-internal team chat. Discord launched in 2015 and became the dominant platform for gaming communities and adjacent online communities. The bulk of the mainstream and semi-technical chat moved to these platforms over the following decade.

The continued operation.

IRC has continued to operate through 2025 and into 2026 despite the mainstream migration. The major networks — Libera Chat (the largest), OFTC, EFnet, IRCnet — continue to operate. The user counts are smaller than the peak years but the communities that remain are committed.

Several specific community categories have stayed on IRC:

Open-source projects. Many of the major open-source projects continue to use IRC for development discussion. The decentralised, federation-friendly nature of IRC fits the culture of open-source development better than vendor-controlled platforms.

Technical communities. System administration communities, networking communities, programming language communities continue to be active on IRC.

Online subcultures. Several long-standing online subcultures have stayed on IRC rather than migrating. The continuity of the community matters more than the technology novelty.

Specific cultural communities. Several language communities, regional communities, and topic-specific communities continue to run on IRC.

The Libera Chat split.

In 2021 the Freenode IRC network — which had been the dominant open-source IRC network for two decades — went through an ownership change that the staff and most users disagreed with. The bulk of the staff and most of the major open-source projects on Freenode migrated en masse to a new network called Libera Chat. The migration happened over several weeks and was largely complete by mid-2021.

Libera Chat has continued to operate as the major open-source IRC network since. The episode demonstrated both the resilience of IRC as a protocol — the migration was operationally manageable — and the importance of the user community over any single network operator.

The influence on modern messaging.

Almost every modern messaging platform shows IRC’s influence in some way. The channel concept (a named space where multiple users can converse) is now universal. The operator-permission model is widely used. The user-handle plus channel-name addressing is the structural model. The bot-and-script ecosystem patterns. The asynchronous-but-real-time conversation flow. All of these are IRC’s contributions to the modern messaging vocabulary.

The protocol-and-client separation is also IRC’s contribution. The fact that you can have many different clients connecting to the same network, that the protocol is open and documented, that anyone can run a server — these are not properties of Slack or Discord but they are properties of IRC.

For technical communities and protocol-curious internet users in 2026, IRC remains worth understanding. Many of the most important open-source projects still run their development on IRC. The technology has survived nearly four decades of internet evolution. And the cultural patterns it established continue to shape how online communities organise themselves.

The history of IRC is one of the longer continuous stories on the internet and one that is still being written.