Windows 8, Microsoft’s 2012 flop, will be retired from all support today, putting the 48 million users who still run the three-year-old operating system with a choice of upgrading or risk getting hacked.
After today, Microsoft will no longer provide security updates for Windows 8 – or for IE10 and IE11, the company browsers that run on the OS – and the company will not offer technical support for the operating system.
To continue to receive security updates, Windows 8 users must upgrade to Windows 8.1, the free 2013 edition available from the Windows Store, Microsoft’s app warehouse.
Today’s support deadline has been in place since the debut of Windows 8.1 more than two years ago, and at the time was characterised by Microsoft as analogous to the 24-month grace period previously given to customers for migrating from a core OS to that operating system’s first service pack.
Although the service pack concept is now dead Microsoft described the Windows 8-to-Windows 8.1 upgrade requirement in service pack terms when it launched the latter in October 2013.
Last month, Net Applications estimated that Windows 8 powered 3% of all Windows personal computers, while the newer Windows 8.1 ran on about 11.3% of Windows PCs.
Using the 1.5 billion number that Microsoft claims as the total number of PCs which run Windows worldwide, Windows 8 was on approximately 48 million systems last month, Windows 8.1 on about 180 million.
To continue to receive support, Windows 8 users must either upgrade to Windows 8.1 – which Microsoft will back until 10 January 2023 – or first upgrade to 8.1, then conduct a second upgrade from that to Windows 10. Consumers and businesses running Windows 8.1 Home or 8.1 Professional are eligible for the free Windows 10 upgrade, an offer set to expire in July.
Microsoft has published instructions for upgrading from Windows 8 to Windows 8.1 on its website.
IDG News Service
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