Microsoft’s Critical Password Warning — Users Have 5 Days To Act

Passwords: You can’t live without them, despite the advance of passkey technology, but unless you act before August 1, the passwords you have generated using Microsoft’s Authenticator app will be deleted. Yes, deleted. This should not come as a surprise, not least as Microsoft has been warning users for the longest time of the password changes to come: In June no new passwords could be added to the app, during July the autofill feature ceased to work and, in just five days time on August 1, your saved passwords won’t be accessible via the app anymore. All of this, seemingly in the name of better security, and with password hacking such a cyber-epidemic, that might not be a bad thing. Or at least it wouldn’t be if I actually believed that to be the case. Here’s what you need to know and do.

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Microsoft Passwords Deadline — What You Need To Know

The whole password deletion and usage debate revolves around one simple act: Microsoft has decided to discontinue the autofill function of the Microsoft Authenticator app as part of an update to streamline the process “so you can use saved passwords easily across devices.” The reasoning behind this seems, dare I say, a little spurious to me. After all, Microsoft readily admits that “autofill in Microsoft Authenticator has been a way to securely store and autofill passwords on apps and websites you visit on your phone,” and that hasn’t changed. What has changed is the desire to get users to move to the more secure passkey technology and, perhaps more pertinently, to move to the Microsoft Edge web browser.

There’s nothing wrong with the password management functionality of the Edge browser, nor the Chrome browser, nor most any browser. From my perspective, however, a dedicated password manager app is a much better option when it comes to password security and management. Removing that option, unless you have set up passkeys for your Microsoft Account as Authenticator will still support these and disabling Authenticator in these circumstances will disable your passkeys, just serves to complicate matters. As the whole passkeys thing I’ve just mentioned goes to prove.

How convoluted is it all? Here’s what Microsoft said: “Your saved passwords (but not your generated password history) and addresses are securely synced to your Microsoft account, and you can continue to access them and enjoy seamless autofill functionality with Microsoft Edge.”

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Microsoft Passwords Deadline — What You Need To Do Before August 1

Let’s start with the Edge browser requirement, which Microsoft has stated you are welcome to ignore and use a different provider, such as Google Password Manager, iCloud Keychain, or any other password management app. Microsoft said that once you set Microsoft as your default autofill provider on your phone, you will need to export passwords from Microsoft Authenticator and then import them into the new service. “For security reasons, you will need to manually recreate your payment info,” Microsoft added.

However, your time is fast running out to do this if you haven’t already. Although your passwords that have already been saved in Microsoft Authenticator will be visible to Microsoft Edge, from August 1 they will no longer be accessible in the app and, therefore, you won’t be able to export them anywhere. And, of course, any generated passwords that have not been saved from the app generator history into the saved passwords category will be deleted.

If you are happy to use Edge as your password autofill provider, then Microsoft has easy-to-follow instructions on its support pages.