Microsoft to disable outdated TLS 1.0, 1.1 for Edge and IE early next year

Laurent Giret

Microsoft Edge logo

Microsoft announced today its plans to drop support for Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol version 1.0 and 1.1 in Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer 11 in the first half of 2020. This early notice comes just a couple of months before the 20th anniversary of TLS 1.0 on January 19, 2019.

“We are announcing our intent to disable these versions by default early, to allow the small portion  of remaining sites sufficient time to upgrade to a newer version,” said Kyle Pflug, Senior Program Manager, Microsoft Edge. According to data from SSL Labs that Microsoft’s blog post mentioned, 94% of the top websites already support the more recent TLS 1.2 cryptographic protocol, and less than 1% of secure connections in Microsoft Edge are currently using TLS 1.0 and 1.1.

“Most sites should not be impacted by this change,” said Pflug. If most websites already support the TLS 1.2 protocol, its successor TLS 1.3, which will allow faster and more secure connections has been defined by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in August of this year. Microsoft is already working to bring support for this new version of the protocol in Microsoft Edge.