Windows 11 loses customers amid the world's most popular OS gaining traction

Microsoft has been pushing Windows 10 users to upgrade to Windows 11 as the cut-off date for Windows 10 support slowly approaches.

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The Redmond-based company has been pushing Windows 10 customers via various in-operating-system advertisements to upgrade to Windows 11, as support for the world's most popular operating system will end on October 25, 2025. Following the severance date, Windows 10 machines will no longer receive security updates, resulting in affected machines becoming exponentially more susceptible to security breaches or hacking. Notably, Windows 10 is still by quite a margin the most-used operating system in the world, with it holding a 61.8% market share versus Windows 11's 34.9% market share.

What's interesting is Windows 11 went from 35.6% in October to 34.9% in November, meaning it lost millions of users. As for Windows 10, the older generation operating system managed to grow its market share by just under 1%. It should be noted that these figures aren't official from Microsoft, as Redmond doesn't make those kinds of statistics public. However, Statcounter calculates its results with data from more than five billion page views across 1.5 million global sites, making it quite a reliable indicator for market share.

At the current pace, millions of Windows 10 users will be left vulnerable when Microsoft axes support for the operating system next year. Additionally, millions of these machines may not even be able to be upgraded to Windows 11 due to the hardware requirements for the operating system. Experts have estimated Microsoft's hardware limitations for Windows 11 will result in 240 million PCs ending up in landfills.