Microsoft sees the future as passwordless; all new accounts will be password-free

It is a year since Microsoft embraced passkeys for user accounts, and now the company is taking things further. With passkeys having been conceived as a replacement for passwords, any newly created Microsoft account will be passwordless.

This is not just a change that is about improving security (passwords having been shown time and time again to be highly fallible), but also user experience. The passkey-by-default approach now being adopted is part of a streamlining of UX for sign-ins.

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Microsoft made the announcement to tie in with the very first World Passkey Day, and it sees the company pledging to work toward increasing the implementation and adoption of passkeys over the coming year.

While there are still billions of passwords in use at the moment, people are being encouraged to switch their authentication methods to passkeys. For new account signups, a password will never be needed as Microsoft says in a blog post:

New accounts are passwordless by default: As part of this simplified UX, we’re changing the default behavior for new accounts. Brand new Microsoft accounts will now be “passwordless by default.” New users will have several passwordless options for signing into their account and they’ll never need to enroll a password. Existing users can visit their account settings to delete their password.

Explaining just why passkeys are so much better than passwords, Microsoft says:

Last year, we introduced passkey support for Microsoft accounts for our consumer apps and services like Xbox and Copilot, and now we see nearly a million passkeys registered every day. Because they’re not entering complex characters or one-time codes, users signing in with passkeys are three times more successful at getting into their account than password users (about 98 percent versus 32 percent). When you use a passkey, you get into your account much quicker too! Passkey sign-ins are eight times faster than a password and multifactor authentication.

There are further changes to see as well; users will be encouraged to sign in with safer options -- which can differ depending on circumstances. Microsoft says: “Instead of showing you all the possible ways for you to sign in, we automatically detect the best available method on your account and set that as the default. For example, if you have a password and “one time code” set up on your account, we’ll prompt you to sign in with your one time code instead of your password. After you’re signed in, you’ll be prompted to enroll a passkey. Then the next time you sign in, you’ll be prompted to sign in with your passkey”. 

Image credit: Dorin Puha / Dreamstime.com