Support for Istio 1.26 ends on 19 December, 2025

According to Istio’s support policy, minor releases like 1.26 are supported until six weeks after the N+2 minor release (1.28 in this case). Istio 1.28 was released on the 5th of November, 2025, and support for 1.26 will end on the 19th of December, 2025.

At that point we will stop back-porting fixes for security issues and critical bugs to 1.26, so we encourage you to upgrade to the latest version of Istio (1.28). If you don’t do this you may put yourself in the position of having to do a major upgrade on a short timeframe to pick up a critical fix.

We care about you and your clusters, so please be kind to yourself and upgrade.