Windows XP user count drops after WannaCry fiasco

Windows XP has been one of the most widely used versions of Microsoft’s desktop operating system which was affected by the WannaCry ransomware, and as compared to the new release, it had been in the need of an emergency patch from the parent company to keep systems secure and block infections.

This is probably because Windows XP no longer receives support since April 2014, and with so many PCs still running it, security experts and Microsoft alike reminded that upgrading to a version which is still supported by Windows is the only way to go secure.

And now it seems that many users of Windows XP got the message, as new statistics show that XP's market share collapsed last month, dropping from 7.04 percent to 5.66 percent.

Apart from the fact that more than 7 per cent of computers were still running on the Windows XP despite the fact that it hasn't received a single patch in the last 3 years, the 1.38 percent decline is the biggest it experienced in the last 12 months and it needed a fiasco like WannaCry to finally convince users to accelerate upgrade efforts to a supported version.

The purported Windows XP was running on almost 10.34 per cent of computers in July 2016, so the operating system barely lost 3 per cent market share points in approximately 10 months, despite no longer getting patches and security updates. Also it even increased its share in January when it to grew from 9.07 percent the month before to 9.17 percent.

Microsoft had rolled out an emergency update to protect Windows XP systems against WannaCry ransomware, this still doesn't mean that this is a secure operating system. All the other vulnerabilities that were discovered before WannaCry are still there and could open systems to additional exploits, and this means that upgrading to supported Windows is indeed the only option.

At this point, the Windows versions that are still getting updates are Windows 7 (whose support ends in January 2020), Windows 8.1 and Windows 10.