The event coincided with the blocking of part of users and requests to bind phone numbers to accounts.

At the end of December, the ICQ administration in the mailing list warned users about disabling the old protocol from December 28. This means that old versions of official applications and unofficial clients will not be supported. Users of third-party clients were advised to upgrade to the new version of the messenger. At the same time, this was not publicly announced – users just received messages from the ICQ Official profile.