Nightly digest ·
GitHub Classroom is decommissioned — website, APIs, and services are gone; plus SurfEasy VPN shuts down 1 September
Two shutdowns tonight, both from the vendors themselves. GitHub Classroom is deprecated as of 28 August: the website, APIs, and related services are decommissioned, your repositories and accounts are safe, but classroom names, out-of-repo tests, and LTI rosters are being permanently deleted — capture them now. SurfEasy VPN reaches end of life on 1 September; the apps and service stop working entirely and eligible customers are moved to Norton VPN. On the board, the 31 August pile-up holds and SurfEasy joins the 1 September line. Monitored sources checked clean; the only new date, Google Assistant's rumored 4 September mobile cutoff, still has no first-party date, so its entry stays without a countdown.
Two vendor-sourced shutdowns tonight — one that landed yesterday and one three days out — plus a re-check that, correctly, produced nothing.
New: GitHub Classroom is decommissioned — the repos are safe, the Classroom layer is gone
GitHub Classroom — GitHub’s tool for running programming courses, where teachers created assignments backed by template repositories, students accepted them into their own repos, and autograding ran tests against submissions — has been retired. GitHub’s changelog states that as of 28 August 2026, GitHub Classroom is deprecated “in favor of our selected partner solutions,” and that the “website, APIs, and related services have now been decommissioned.”
The distinction GitHub draws is the whole story for anyone with a course on it. The GitHub side is untouched — “any GitHub user accounts, repositories, and organizations created to work with Classroom are not affected” — so student work already in repos stays put. What disappears is the Classroom scaffolding on top: GitHub says some data — “classroom and assignment names, tests defined outside of repositories, and LTI integrated rosters” — “will be permanently deleted in accordance with GitHub’s data retention policies.” So if your roster came from an LTI integration, or your autograding tests were configured in the Classroom UI rather than committed into the assignment repos, those are the pieces that vanish rather than migrate.
This wasn’t sudden so much as fast for a teaching tool: GitHub ended new sign-ups on 26 May 2026, and the 28 August decommission “completes the transition process we announced on May 26” — arriving right as many institutions set up for the autumn term. The action items are small but time-sensitive: record any LTI rosters and student→repo mappings now, confirm your autograding tests are committed into the assignment repositories (tests in repos survive; tests defined in the Classroom UI don’t), and pick a replacement — GitHub’s “selected partner solutions” (see the GitHub Educator Community Discussion), or plain GitHub with Actions for autograding and an org of per-student repos for distribution.
New: SurfEasy VPN shuts down 1 September — the apps stop working entirely
SurfEasy VPN, a long-running consumer VPN app, reaches end of life on 1 September 2026. Its owner Gen (the Norton / Cyber Safety brands family) is blunt about the cutoff: “After this date, the SurfEasy apps and services will no longer work. i.e., you will not be able to access your account, download, activate, connect, or use the app properly.” This is a hard stop, not a wind-down — Gen frames it as “portfolio simplification,” concentrating investment on fewer VPN products.
The risk with a VPN shutdown is the quiet one: the day the app stops connecting, traffic you assumed was tunneled falls back to an ordinary unprotected connection with no warning. Eligible SurfEasy Legacy and Annual customers are offered Norton VPN at no extra cost — a product key arrives by email — so activate that before the date; anyone who’d rather not move to Norton VPN should install a replacement and remove SurfEasy from any device or router still pointing at it. Because the apps stop entirely on the 1st, there’s no grace period to reconnect and finish afterward.
On the board
- 31 August — the pile-up holds: Delibr (export your product docs before deletion), GitHub Spark, Flowise cloud, the New Relic drop-filter-rules API, and the Power Automate mobile app.
- 1 September — SurfEasy VPN joins the line, alongside Azure’s nested confidential cc_v5 VM retirement (added to the archive tonight — resize those VMs or they’re deallocated on the date).
Further out: OpenSSL 3.0 (7 September), the GitHub Copilot MAI-Code-1-Flash deprecation (10 September), the Relay and Microsoft Sentinel SAP connector agent retirements (both 14 September, the latter re-confirmed tonight against Microsoft’s release-communications API since its updates page is JavaScript-rendered), the OpenAI Sora 2 video API shutdown (24 September), and MTurk on 30 September.
One thing we did not add: the widely-reported 4 September date for Google Assistant’s removal from mobile still appears only on secondary and community pages — Google’s own blog says only “later this year.” Per our no-inferred-dates rule, the Google Assistant → Gemini entry stays without a countdown until Google publishes the date first-party. The full board with live countdowns is on the calendar.