Microsoft has announced that all newly created Microsoft accounts will now be “passwordless by default.”
The tech giant says this change is part of a broader effort to eliminate passwords altogether-long considered a weak link in digital security due to their susceptibility to phishing, brute-force attacks, and credential stuffing.
The announcement was made by Joy Chik, Microsoft’s President for Identity & Network Access, and Vasu Jakkal, Corporate Vice President for Microsoft Security.
“As the world shifts from passwords to passkeys, we’re excited to join the FIDO Alliance in leaving “World Password Day” behind to celebrate the very first “World Passkey Day,” they said.
“To commemorate this renaming, Microsoft and dozens of other organizations have taken the Passkey Pledge to work toward increasing the implementation and adoption of passkeys over the coming year. For Microsoft, taking the pledge continues our commitment to a future where every sign in is simple and secure.”
According to the executives, the change follows updates to the company’s sign-in and sign-up experiences on both web and mobile platforms, which began rolling out in March.
These updates are optimized for passwordless and passkey-first authentication methods.
“As part of this simplified UX, we’re changing the default behavior for new accounts,” Chik and Jakkal said.
“Brand new Microsoft accounts will now be ‘passwordless by default.'”
Rather than setting or remembering a traditional password, new users will be offered a suite of passwordless login options from the outset. These include sign-in methods such as device-based authentication, biometrics like fingerprints and facial recognition, and the increasingly adopted passkeys.
Microsoft will automatically enable the most suitable passwordless method based on the user’s environment.
The company is also encouraging existing account holders to follow suit. Users with older Microsoft accounts can navigate to their account settings to remove their passwords entirely and switch to passwordless alternatives.
The transition is being backed by promising data from internal tests.
“This simplified experience gets you signed in faster and in our experiments has reduced password use by over 20%,” Chik and Jakkal noted.
They anticipate that as more users enroll passkeys, reliance on password-based authentication will steadily decline-potentially leading to the full deprecation of password support in the future.
Microsoft has been a strong advocate for passwordless security, serving as a board member of the FIDO (Fast Identity Online) Alliance. This industry group promotes open standards for secure authentication and passkey usage, which now spans over 15 billion user accounts worldwide.
The company began laying the groundwork for this transition over the past several years.
In 2022, it introduced support for passkey authentication in personal Microsoft accounts, and in 2023, it integrated a built-in passkey manager with Windows Hello via the Windows 11 22H2 feature update.
More recently, Microsoft began testing enhancements to the WebAuthn API that would allow Windows 11 users to authenticate using passkeys from third-party providers.
