Comment by drysart

What? No they didn't. They extended the deprecation timeline for Windows 2019 agents from the original EOL date of 30 June 2025 to 31 December 2025; with a well-published brownout period from 2 December to 9 December in addition to the original brownout period from 3 June to 24 June.

The initial banners and warning emails about it went out well ahead of the original EOL timeline; and again as the extended EOL drew close.

If you were caught off guard by the brownout period, it's your devops team that's to blame, not Microsoft; and Microsoft was absolutely right to blame you for not migrating sooner. They gave you an extra 6 months to do it because you should have had all this done back in the first half of the year.

(If you want to blame Microsoft for anything here, blame them for not having a comprehensive tool to identify all your windows-2019 pipelines and instead just relying on "just go look at the latest pipeline runs page and hope everything's run recently enough to be on that".)