Microsoft is walking away from more products this year than it did in 2025. Products that still run on millions of devices, including Windows 11 24H2, Office 2021, SQL Server 2016, and Windows Server 2012’s last ESU year, all expire in 2026.
While 2025 was mostly about Windows 10, 2026 is a pile-up.
Also, in case you didn’t know it already, once a product hits its date, security updates, bug fixes, and paid support stop, unless Microsoft happens to offer an Extended Security Updates program for it, and even ESU only covers critical security fixes, nothing else.
Note that this doesn’t mean a software becomes unusable. It just stops being protected. For a note-taking app, that’s alright. But for a database sitting behind your company firewall, the consequences can be devastating if you don’t do anything about it.
So, we went through Microsoft’s official 2026 lifecycle page, checked every date, and ranked all of it by how many people it hits and how bad the fallout.
Here is the list of all important Microsoft products losing support in 2026.
