Microsoft 365 Subscribers Will Soon Lose Access to Free VPN

Microsoft has quietly announced that it’s discontinuing the free VPN that was available with its Microsoft Defender app for Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscribers. The privacy protection feature will be going away on February 28, and a support note discovered by Windows Central suggests that its usage was probably very low.

“We routinely evaluate the usage and effectiveness of our features. As such, we are removing the privacy protection feature and will invest in new areas that will better align to customer needs,” the company explained.

This free VPN within the Microsoft Defender app is currently available in select markets for Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android users with a Microsoft 365 consumer subscription. The feature encrypts Internet traffic and hides users’ IP addresses with a limit of 50GB of data per month. However, unlike other VPNs, Microsoft Defender doesn’t let users choose a specific region to connect to as it automatically chooses the closest VPN server.

The removal of this free VPN comes just a few weeks after Microsoft increased the price of its Microsoft 365 consumer subscriptions worldwide to compensate for the addition of new AI features. The company justified the $3/month price increase with the fact that this was a first since the launch of the subscriptions 12 years ago. However, existing subscribers who don’t want these new Copilot features in their Office apps will be able to switch to new “Classic” plans with no price increases.