IPL (ipl.org) is shutting down Nov 9, 2026: download your uploads first (accounts and data deleted)

What changed

IPL, the essay and study-help site at ipl.org, is closing. A help-center article titled "Important Update: IPL is Retiring. Everything You Need to Know." (dated September 28, 2026) says: "Effective November 9, 2026, IPL will be officially retired" and "After that date, the site will be taken offline permanently." Nothing moves elsewhere: "We are not migrating any content or product features from IPL to a new platform." The article says the shutdown lets the company "channel our energy into other Learneo businesses" and points students to Course Hero, QuillBot, Scribbr and LitCharts.

Accounts

"After this date, logins will be disabled and you will no longer have access to your user account." If you can't log in, IPL says to email support@ipl.org "before November 9, 2026. We may not be able to help after support winds down."

Your uploads

"You can download everything you've uploaded to IPL before it closes on November 9, 2026. We'd recommend doing this sooner than later." After that, "you won't be able to access your account or retrieve your content."

Public pages

"Public pages on IPL will stop being available after November 9, 2026," though "search engines and third-party archive sites may keep cached copies for a while, which is outside our control."

Data

"we will delete user accounts and data," but "we may retain certain user information for a limited period of time following November 9, 2026." IPL also says it isn't "selling, transferring, or licensing user-uploaded content to anyone, and we won't use it to train models or build other products."

Billing

"All recurring charges will be stopped before November 9, 2026." Subscribers with time left past that date "may be eligible for a prorated refund," and IPL says support "will reach out to you directly."

Some history

The ipl.org domain once belonged to the Internet Public Library, a nonprofit online library that opened on March 17, 1995, was later run by a consortium headed by Drexel University, and stopped operating in 2015. The site that reopened on the domain around 2020 is a commercial essay repository, which is the service now closing.

What to do

Log in and download anything you uploaded, especially essays you wrote yourself and don't have elsewhere; if you link to your public IPL pages from a portfolio or class site, save copies now; if you're a paying subscriber, watch the email tied to your account for the refund notice, and contact support@ipl.org before November 9 if you can't get in.

Who it affects

Students and other users with IPL (ipl.org) accounts, especially anyone who uploaded essays or files, shares public IPL pages, or pays for an IPL subscription

Who else has reported it · checked October 21apart from IPL's own help page, we found no news reports or social posts about the shutdown.

Source

Detected on the IPL terms page: https://ipl-support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/43831334972695-Important-Update-IPL-is-Retiring-Everything-You-Need-to-Know. Always check the source; this summary is not legal or financial advice.

Other sources:

Provenance: detected in our Oct 21 snapshot of the IPL terms page. Excerpts marked "Quoted from the documents" come from the sources linked above.