Citing the impact of ‘the public health situation’ on customers, Microsoft is going to continue to issue security updates for some flavors of Windows 10 1709 for six additional months.

Microsoft’s planned end of support cut-off date for Windows 10 1709 was going to be on April 14. But, on March 19, the company began notifying customers that it had pushed that date back to October 13 for those running Enterprise, Education and IoT versions of the product. Microsoft’s post doesn’t refer to the COVID-19 coronavirus by name, but that’s the implication as the reason for the push-back.

Microsoft’s blog post on its Tech Community site announced the change:

“We have been evaluating the public health situation and understand the impact this is having on many of our customers. To help ease one of the many burdens IT teams are facing, based on customer feedback, we are going to delay the scheduled end of service date for the Enterprise, Education, and IoT Enterprise editions of Windows 10, version 1709. This means devices will receive monthly security updates only from May to October. The final security update for these editions of Windows 10, version 1709 will be released on Oct. 13, 2020, instead of April 14, 2020.”

Support for Windows 10 1709 Home, Pro, Pro Education, and Pro Workstations Editions already ended on April 9, 2019.

Enterprise and Education variants Windows 10 1803, which became broadly available on April 30, 2018, are slated to exit support on Nov. 10, 2020 at this point.