The Ubuntu 20.04 Actions runner image will begin deprecation on 2025-02-01 and will be fully unsupported by 2025-04-15

[gdryke]

Breaking changes

We will soon start the deprecation process for Ubuntu 20.04. While the image is being deprecated, you may experience longer queue times during peak usage hours. Deprecation will begin on 2025-02-01 and the image will be fully unsupported by 2025-04-15.

To raise awareness of the upcoming removal, we will temporarily fail jobs using Ubuntu 20.04. Builds that are scheduled to run during the brownout periods will fail. The brownouts are scheduled for the following dates and times:

GitHub Actions\Azure DevOps::

• March 4 14:00 UTC – 22:00 UTC
• March 11 13:00 UTC – 21:00 UTC
• March 18 13:00 UTC – 21:00 UTC
• March 25 13:00 UTC – 21:00 UTC
• April 1 13:00 UTC – 21:00 UTC
• April 8 13:00 UTC – 21:00 UTC

Target date

2025-04-01
2025-04-15

The motivation for the changes

We maintain the latest two stable versions of any given OS version. Ubuntu 24.04 is going GA on 2025-02-01 so we start deprecating the oldest image at that time.

Possible impact

Workflows using the ubuntu-20.04 image label should be updated to ubuntu-latest, ubuntu-22.04, ubuntu-24.04 .

Platforms affected

• Azure DevOps
• GitHub Actions

Runner images affected

• Ubuntu 20.04
• Ubuntu 22.04
• Ubuntu 24.04
• macOS 12
• macOS 13
• macOS 13 Arm64
• macOS 14
• macOS 14 Arm64
• macOS 15
• macOS 15 Arm64
• Windows Server 2019
• Windows Server 2022

Mitigation ways

N/A

[AlexSkrypnyk]

Could you please use ISO standard for dates. It is not clear what this is 2025-04-01 - April or Jan?

[rtiangha]

That is ISO 8601.

https://www.iso.org/iso-8601-date-and-time-format.html

[AlexSkrypnyk]

This does not #10721
The confusion is real. It should not be a puzzle for a community to decipher the public announcements.

[rtiangha]

Then maybe post the ISO complaint under the right issue? The dates in this issue's description are correct.

[lonex-branch]

I assume this only affects GitHub-hosted runner. Can i ask a related question about ubuntu 20.04 upgrade to the self-hosted runner? As long as we keep our runner API by integrating the latest release from the actions/runner project, to what point we need to start worrying about the OS version of the self-hosted runner that requires a needed upgrade?