The Microsoft end of support date that mattered most this year was 14 July 2026, and it has passed.
SharePoint Server 2016, SharePoint Server 2019, SQL Server 2016, and Project Server 2016 and 2019 all went out of support on that date. If you are still running any of them, you have been unsupported for roughly a month. That is the honest starting position, and most guidance on this topic is still written as though the deadline is ahead of you.
What out of support actually means
The software keeps working. Nothing switches off, no licence expires, and for a while nothing at all appears to happen. This is precisely why the risk gets deprioritised.
What stops is security updates, bug fixes, technical support, and updated documentation. A vulnerability disclosed next month in SQL Server 2016 does not get a patch. The exposure does not arrive on the deadline. It accumulates afterwards, quietly, and the first evidence is usually either an audit finding or an incident.
Extended Security Updates exist for some products and are worth pricing. Understand what you are buying: critical security fixes, not support and not features. ESU is a way to schedule your migration on your own terms rather than an alternative to doing it.
Where this bites first
Not from attackers. From paperwork.
Unsupported software fails questionnaires. Your cyber insurance renewal asks whether you run supported versions. Customer security reviews ask. SOC 2 and ISO auditors ask, and an unsupported database holding customer data is a finding rather than a discussion. Any one of those can surface months before an attacker does, and each of them arrives with a deadline attached.
If you are past 14 July on any of the above, the useful move this week is a written statement of position: what is still running, what compensating controls exist, and what the migration plan and date are. You will need that document for at least one of the conversations above, and writing it now is considerably easier than writing it under a customer’s timeline.
The dates still ahead
Two are close enough to plan for.
13 October 2026. Office 2021 retires, covering Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Access, OneNote, Publisher, Project and Visio. Windows 11 Home and Pro version 24H2 shares the same date. This one reaches end users rather than servers, which makes it a rollout problem rather than a migration project, and rollouts are slower than people plan for.
10 November 2026. Windows 11 Enterprise, Education and IoT Enterprise 23H2.
Windows 10 2016 LTSB and Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2 also reach their dates during October. Microsoft’s lifecycle page lists more than fifty products, versions and Azure services losing support across 2026, so the five names above are a starting point rather than an inventory.
Do the inventory against the lifecycle page
The most common failure here is not ignoring a known deadline. It is not knowing something is running.
Old SQL Server instances survive under applications nobody associates with a database. SharePoint farms outlive the project that needed them. A version you decommissioned frequently has one node left that somebody kept for a report.
Take your actual estate, check it against Microsoft’s published lifecycle data rather than against memory, and record a date next to every version. That list is what makes the next three years predictable instead of a series of surprises.
Why we cover this
End of support is the most orderly version of a shutdown. It is announced years ahead, published on a page anyone can read, and it still catches organisations out, which tells you something useful about the disorderly versions.
The difference between this and a SaaS vendor deciding to retire a product is that here you keep running the software after the date. The exposure is slower and easier to ignore. That does not make it smaller.
The general playbook is in Your Vendor Is Shutting Down. A live example with a shorter fuse is Opsgenie’s April 2027 end of life. CopperFeed records retirements as they are announced.
Dates here reflect published reporting on Microsoft’s lifecycle announcements at the time of writing. Verify against Microsoft’s own lifecycle documentation before planning against them, and check ESU eligibility per product.