Amazon says more than 500 million customers have turned on passkeys

Amazon updated its passkey announcement on October 20 to report that "more than 500 million customers have enabled passkeys on their Amazon accounts." The original post dates from October 23, 2023, when Amazon first rolled out passkeys. Amazon says signing in with a passkey is about six times faster than with a password, and that over the past year it added passkey enrollment prompts during sign-in, passkey use on sign-in pages, and support across its major apps. Passkeys work in browsers, the iOS and Android Amazon Shopping apps, and the Audible apps; customers add one under Your Account, Login & Security. Amazon does not say passkeys are now the default or that passwords are being removed. It describes that as a direction: "We're building toward a future where customers no longer need to rely on passwords."

Why it matters

Half a billion enrollments at one retailer is a large share of the 7 billion passkeys the FIDO Alliance estimates exist, covered in our Passkey Index post. The enrollment tactic is the useful part for CIAM teams: prompting at sign-in, when the user is already authenticated, does more than a settings page nobody visits.

Enrollment is not the same as protection. While the password and its reset flow stay live, an attacker phishes the password or abuses recovery, not the passkey. Amazon has not published sign-in share or fallback rates, so the security gain is unmeasured from the outside. If you run a consumer login, track the share of sign-ins by method and the share of accounts with no password, not enrollment alone. Our passkey implementation guide covers the sequence from enrollment to removing the fallback.

Source: Amazon