Microsoft 365 users still on Windows 10 will be out of luck when Windows 10 is retired in October

If you're still running Windows 10 and you subscribe to Microsoft 365, your Microsoft 365 apps will cease to function on Oct. 14, 2025, according to an official Microsoft blog post. This will happen when Microsoft ends Windows 10 support, which seems slated to cause unprecedented levels of completely unnecessary e-waste, because apparently (at least according to Microsoft!) every PC made before TPM 2.0 modules belongs in the trash.

Now, is it fair to expect Microsoft to support Windows 10 forever? No. However, dropping support for Windows 11 simply means that the company will no longer continue to deliver security updates and bug fixes — not that your PC will become a brick after Oct. 14. But Microsoft 365 is partially web-based, so Microsoft can cut off support — and will, according to the blog post, which states that "To use Microsoft 365 Applications on your device, you will need to upgrade to Windows 11."

You can download the Office apps to your PC, but you need to connect to the internet once every 31 days or the apps go into reduced functionality mode, so, presumably, you'll have 31 days from Oct. 14. This won't, of course, apply to the fully web-based browser versions of the apps.

But dropping support for a suite of applications that currently work perfectly fine on Windows 10 for paying subscribers when the support for the OS ends is certainly not a very consumer-friendly move. Microsoft's blog post pushes users toward a free Windows 11 upgrade, but the fact of the matter is that if you're currently running Windows 10 and you want to be running Windows 11 — there's probably a reason. If you haven't upgraded to Windows 11, you either don't want to or you don't have hardware with TPM 2.0 support. You can, of course, bypass Windows 11's TPM 2.0 requirement, but it's not the easy upgrade Microsoft suggest it is.

It's good that third parties like 0Patch are willing to keep supporting the security of Windows 10 users, but that clearly won't be enough to keep the full functionality of Windows 10 present for its current users. Even Microsoft's Extended Security Updates program won't save you from the company dropping Microsoft 365 access.

If you rely on Microsoft 365, I recommend moving as much of your workflow to either Google Drive or open-source office software such as LibreOffice as soon as possible. Business customers should be pretty well-served by Google Apps, regardless of their OS, for quite some time.

Christopher Harper has been a successful freelance tech writer specializing in PC hardware and gaming since 2015, and ghostwrote for various B2B clients in High School before that. Outside of work, Christopher is best known to friends and rivals as an active competitive player in various eSports (particularly fighting games and arena shooters) and a purveyor of music ranging from Jimi Hendrix to Killer Mike to the Sonic Adventure 2 soundtrack.