Microsoft to make new accounts password-less by default

Think of something you’ll remember forever, something so close to your heart or brain that you wouldn’t have to write it down to keep it top of mind. You’ll have to type it out every day for 30 days. It has to have 15 characters, an uppercase letter, a lowercase letter, a symbol, and a number. The numbers cannot be consecutive. It cannot be similar to anything you’ve ever said before. You will have to recall this secret code constantly or risk being locked out of every device and subscription you need.

Of course, we’re talking about your password, and it is a nightmare. Now, Microsoft wants to get rid of passwords entirely.

The company announced this week that moving forward, all new Microsoft accounts will be “passwordless by default.”

According to a May 1 post on Microsoft’s blog, the move is part of a “journey toward passwordless sign-in.” Instead of using a password to sign on, Microsoft wants you to use a passkey, which could be a PIN or a biometric option such as facial recognition or a fingerprint scan. (That sounds a lot better than Sam Altman’s eyeball-scanning machine, The Orb.)

“[Users] signing in with passkeys are three times more successful at getting into their account than password users (about 98% versus 32%),” the blog post reads. “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.”

So not only will signing in be less annoying, but it will also be more efficient, Microsoft argues.

“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,'” Microsoft wrote in its blog post. “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.”

Microsoft isn’t the only tech company moving towards passkey-friendly logins. Amazon, Google, and WhatsApp are all also working towards it.