Your firewall is the one device on your network the whole internet can reach, which makes it the worst possible thing to leave unpatched. Fortinet hardware has a published life cycle: an end-of-order date when it stops being sold, and an end-of-support date, normally five years later, when firmware and FortiGuard security updates stop for good.
Firewall vulnerabilities are among the most actively exploited anywhere, so running a FortiGate past that second date is not a theoretical risk. It’s also a straight failure for Cyber Essentials, which requires unsupported kit to be removed or isolated.
2026 is catching a lot of FortiGates
The timing is worth knowing. A cluster of very popular E-series models, including the FortiGate 61E, 101E, 300E and 500E, reached end of support in July 2026, and the widely deployed 60E follows in December. The FortiGate 100E family goes end of support in August 2026. Even the newer F-series desktop range mostly stopped being orderable in spring 2026. If your firewall went in before about 2022, it deserves a check.
What the checker tells you
Type your model into our free FortiGate end-of-life checker, in whatever format is on the label: FortiGate 60E, FG-60E and FWF-60D all work. You get the end-of-order and end-of-support dates from Fortinet’s published life-cycle data, plus four ways forward:
- Stay with Fortinet, with the replacement chain resolved to models you can actually buy today.
- Step up to Palo Alto, with the like-for-like model named for your size of firewall.
- Switch to UniFi and drop the annual licence renewals entirely.
- Move to SASE, with FortiSASE or Prisma Access delivering the firewall’s job from the cloud, which is the zero-trust route we’d encourage most hybrid-working businesses to look at seriously.
Plan it, don’t firefight it
A planned firewall replacement gets a staged cut-over, out of hours, with a tested rollback. A dead or breached one gets whatever’s in stock that week. We deploy and support all of the platforms above as part of our network services, so check your dates, and if the result is amber or red, get in touch and we’ll price the options honestly.
