Windows Update is shutting down for NT5.x on July 19,2019: What now?(Spoiler: It isn’t)
Published on 2019/04/25, by NojusK.

Update 2019-09-05: It appears that the news page has lied to us and made a false alarm

Recently while reading the news I saw this:

It is understood that users will have until 19 July 2019 to apply the last updates, before the whole update system is switched off, not least of all because it doesn’t meet modern Windows Update security criteria

From here [LINK]

It means that anyone wanting to update their NT5.x based systems won’t be able to because they will have shutdown the update servers. It’s going to be harder to update them because of this. Back in 2009 Microsoft decided to shutdown the update servers for Windows 95 and in 2011 for Windows 98 and Millennium Edition. My guess about 98/Me servers shutdown is because that same year Office XP support ended, and since it was the last Office version to run on those OSes. Same situation for Windows 95. Office 2000 support ended in 2009 so yeah makes sense. Although it doesn’t makes sense on shutting down the XP/Server 2003 update servers since Office 2010(last version to run on them) is still supported until October 13, 2020. Since i told about this at MSFN, XP users have started making backups encase they delete the updates from the Catalog. Soon we might expect an (un)official service pack that contains all updates in all languages.