Microsoft plans to end support for several editions of Windows 10 this October. While customers may subscribe to extended security updates to extend support by one (home) or up to three (business / Enterprise) years, it was unclear how Microsoft would handle support for some of its other products and services running on Windows 10, including Microsoft 365.
Do Windows 10 customers, who run apps like Word or Excel after October 14th, 2025, get support when they run into issues? What about software updates? These customers pay Microsoft for access after all.
A new blog post by Microsoft provides answers to these questions and others that customers may have.
Will Microsoft 365 continue to work after Windows 10’s end of support date? Microsoft says yes. Apps like Word or Excel will continue to work. The company notes, however, that running the apps on an unsupported operating system may lead to performance and reliability issues. Microsoft recommends to switch to Windows 11 to avoid these.
For how long will Microsoft support Microsoft 365 on Windows 10? Microsoft plans to release security updates for Microsoft 365 apps under Windows 10 for three years starting the day support ends officially. This seems to imply that the applications won’t receive feature updates anymore. Whether that is indeed the case remains to be seen. Support will end on October 10th, 2028 either way.
Support is limited on Windows 10. While Microsoft promises to support Microsoft 365 apps on Windows 10 for another three years with security updates, it is limiting support in other areas. When customers encounter bugs that affect the Windows 10 version only, Microsoft support will ask the customer to make the switch to Windows 11.
Microsoft limited Office support in the past on Windows systems that ran out of support.
In closing, Microsoft 365 customers may continue to use apps like Word or Excel after support ends. Microsoft will provide security updates for three years, but does not guarantee much besides that.
Now You: do you use Microsoft Office or Microsoft 365? Are you affected by the end of support for Windows 10?
“When customers encounter bugs that affect the Windows 10 version only, Microsoft support will ask the customer to make the switch to Windows 10”
That doesn’t make sense. Would MS push customers to an LTSC version if this happens?
I would suspect they recommend Win 11.
Hi,you are right. It is Windows 11 that support will recommend in that case.