Microsoft to stop sending SMS codes for personal accounts
Microsoft is phasing out SMS codes for personal account authentication and recovery. The company is shifting towards passwordless methods, such as passkeys and verified email, to enhance security and user experience. This change aims to reduce the risks associated with SMS-based authentication, which has become a target for fraud.
- ▪Microsoft is committed to advancing security standards by eliminating SMS as a method of authentication.
- ▪Passkeys are being introduced as a more secure and user-friendly alternative to SMS codes.
- ▪The transition to passkeys aims to reduce the risk of phishing and account takeover.
2 outlets in our directory ran this story, first to last over 29 hours. All of the coverage we found sits in one bucket: centre. That one-sidedness is itself worth noticing.
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Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Microsoft |
| Canonical URL | https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/accounts-billing/manage/microsoft-to-stop-sending-sms-codes-for-personal-accounts |
| Publication time | Fri, 22 May 2026 18:15:32 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-22T18:32:02.758Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-22T18:32:02.758Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | zP4cajYR8540 · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Microsoft to stop sending SMS codes for personal accounts Microsoft is committed to advancing security standards and as such, we will start phasing out SMS as a method of authentication and account recovery for personal Microsoft accounts. Why is SMS no longer a method of authentication and account recovery for a personal Microsoft account? Microsoft believes that the future of authentication is passwordless, secure, and user-friendly. SMS-based authentication is now a leading source of fraud, and by moving to passwordless accounts, passkeys, and verified email, we're helping you stay ahead of evolving threats while making account access simpler and more seamless.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Microsoft.