GoKawiilMicrosoft to shut down Calendar, People and Files companion apps by December 2026
Microsoft announced it is retiring its Microsoft 365 companion apps—Calendar, People, and Files—effective December 16, 2026, after which they will stop functioning and lose support. The company is telling IT administrators to uninstall the apps from managed devices before that date. The move comes roughly a year after Microsoft began automatically pushing these taskbar-integrated apps to Windows 11 enterprise devices running Microsoft 365 desktop clients.
GoKawiil's interpretation of the reporting above, not reported fact.
The apps were only recently forced onto enterprise machines by default, so their sudden retirement creates extra cleanup work for IT teams who must now actively remove software Microsoft itself just installed. It also signals Microsoft may be consolidating these taskbar productivity features elsewhere, possibly folding them deeper into Copilot or other Microsoft 365 experiences rather than maintaining standalone apps.
- Calendar, People, and Files companion apps end support on December 16, 2026
- Admins are urged to manually remove the apps from managed devices before that deadline
- The retirement follows Microsoft's own automatic rollout of these apps just a year earlier
Source: bleepingcomputer.com, 2026-09-21
Published there as: “Microsoft to retire Microsoft 365 Companion apps in December”
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