If MFA is enforced by your organization, and if you’re not currently excluded from MFA prompts like you maybe would be in an office building/network you may need to provide an alternative 2FA method like an OTP received by SMS or email if you’re not already logged in on your desktop. If you got a new phone and don’t use your old phone anymore or if you’ve lost it, you can delete it from the sign-in methods. Delete the one which is sorted last in the list. In this case, both Authenticator apps will have the same description in the portal. If you deleted the app on your current phone and restore the backup to the same device, the old registration will stop working. Since it’s a new device, you need to add it again. The Restore button at the bottom of this page didn’t do anything for me. This portal doesn’t show the Microsoft Authenticator logo though.

It doesn’t matter which portal you’re using. If you head over to you will be able to add or edit your MFA methods for a Microsoft work or school account. As of drafting this article, the app currently sits on #7 in Productivity on Apple’s App Store, so I assume it’s quite popular. I’m sure that many IT Pros use Microsoft Authenticator for all or most of their 2FA codes because that’s what they first used, when MFA was initially required by the company they work for.

Usually, every code is only valid for 30 seconds) Microsoft Authenticator I hadn’t, so here we are.įirst, let’s cover some of the abbreviations which I’m going to use in this article.ĢFA = Second Factor Authentication (Password is not enough, you need to either enter a one time code or verify a login in a mobile app) MFA = Multi Factor Authentication (Pretty much the same as 2FA, the term is primarily used by Microsoft) OTP = One Time Password (Usually, a 6 to 8 digit long code received by email or SMS which can only be used once) TOTP = Time Based One Time Password (Usually, a 6 to 8 digit long code which gets generated (and hashed against the current time) by an app. This sparked a private discussion between Andrés Gorzelany and me where he asked me if I had written a blog post about this already. How To Handle Password and 2FA Madness Like a ProĮvery once in a while, I come across a random Twitter conversation where people share their struggles and frustrations about the current state of 2FA apps and migrating those codes to a new phone.

Move ms authenticator to new phone