Microsoft has announced that it is killing off WordPad, and will soon be removing the software from Windows altogether. As noticed by PC Gamer in a deprecated features post from Microsoft for Windows, it is directly mentioned that WordPad will receive no further updates and will be removed in the future.
Specifically, Microsoft states: "WordPad is no longer being updated and will be removed in a future release of Windows. We recommend Microsoft Word for rich text documents like .doc and .rtf and Windows Notepad for plain text documents like .txt."
There's no mention of when exactly WordPad will be removed, but this is part of a recent slate of changes from Microsoft, who are in the process of removing and scaling back on a variety of features, including Cortana.