British, Irish governments to pay Microsoft to extend Windows XP support

Although Microsoft had announced seven years ago that it would discontinue support for Windows XP from next Tuesday, the governments of the UK and Ireland are paying the software giant to continue providing support and security updates for Windows XP used by their public sector bodies.

Microsoft had said in 2007 that after 8 April 2014, it would no longer provide security updates or technical support for Windows XP and advised users to migrate to a current supported operating system – such as Windows 8.1 so that they could receive regular security updates to protect their computer from malicious attacks.

However many users, including public sector bodies of several countries continue to use Windows XP.

The British government has signed a deal worth $9.2 million with Microsoft to provide critical and important security updates for Windows XP, as well as Office 2003 and Exchange 2003 for the entire UK public sector for 12 months after 8 April.

Similarly, the Irish government will pay $4.5 million to Microsoft to continue to provide support for Windows XP for its public sector bodies that have not yet switched to a newer system.

Public sector bodies are not the only ones who have not made the switchover, some banks and large companies have yet to migrate to a newer system and are reported to be paying huge sums to Microsoft to continue providing security updates.

Despite being an old operating system, Windows XP is the second-most popular operating system after Microsoft's Windows 7 OS and currently has a market share of 29.53 per cent, which is equal to around 500 million computers worldwide.

Over 95 per cent of the world's ATM machines are still using Windows XP as a back-end operating system.

But Microsoft says that without critical Windows XP security updates, PCs may become vulnerable to harmful viruses, spyware, and other malicious software which can steal or damage data and information, as anti-virus software will not be able to fully protect them once Windows XP itself becomes unsupported.