The first time that SEOs were faced with the prospect of PageRank
going away was a year ago, when Matt Cuts suggested that there would be
no further updates in 2013.
Source: SEORoundtable.com
Later that same month, Cutts indicated the pipeline that pushes PageRank data from the internal Google servers to the toolbar broke
and there were no plans to fix it. It was widely speculated at that
time that there would never be another PageRank update....
