SMS and Voice Are Retiring Still Here. Microsoft Just Stopped Paying the Phone Bill.

Microsoft Stopped Paying for the Texts. SMS and Voice Stay.

I've been on more calls than I can count over the past few weeks, and the same question keeps coming up: what is actually happening with SMS and Voice in Entra? There's a misconception doing the rounds, so let me add some context.

Microsoft is retiring Microsoft-provided telephony delivery for SMS and Voice. The methods themselves stay in Entra ID. If you have a business, regulatory, or technical reason to keep SMS and Voice after the retirement date, you can. You configure a telephony provider through Microsoft Security Store and pay that provider for the messages and calls.

The road beyond SMS and Voice

Most of the confusion I hear comes from people collapsing this into one date. There are five, all from Microsoft's Message Center post MC1426371, and the yellow marker shows where we are today.

We are hereSep 26, 2026

Bring Your Own Telecom Keeps SMS Alive, With Fine Print

Microsoft calls it Choose Your Own Telephony Provider. You pick a provider in Security Store, sign their agreement, configure them for Entra ID, and monitor the service. Entra keeps enforcing your authentication methods policy and runs the sign-in experience. The provider delivers the SMS or places the call. Private preview

Microsoft positions this for user segments with a documented requirement, and asks you to confirm a phishing-resistant method can't meet it first. For most MSP customers, that's a short list: a shared-device frontline team, a regulated workflow that mandates an out-of-band SMS. Everyone else should land on passkeys, which cost nothing extra.

September 1 Already Happened in Your Tenants. Go Check.

Unless a tenant opted out beforehand, its SMS and Voice users were auto-enabled for passkeys on September 1 and put into a passkey profile that allows all passkey types. The Registration Campaign was set to Microsoft Managed, targeting passkeys. The next time those users complete MFA, they see a prompt to register a passkey. By default they can snooze it forever.

Unlimited snoozes sound harmless. They aren't, because users who snooze until February 1 hit the same prompt with the snooze button gone. Confused end users become angry end users fast, and the helpdesk ticket lands on you.

Run these against every customer tenant:

• Is Passkey (FIDO2) enabled, and does the passkey profile your users landed in match what you actually want? If you restrict to device-bound passkeys or specific AAGUIDs, the auto-created profile allows all types.
• Are your SMS and Voice users in a group that can actually register passkeys, or are they excluded somewhere else in the policy?
• Is the Registration Campaign now Microsoft Managed, and did you expect that?
• Have users been told what the prompt is before they see it? Microsoft publishes end-user communication templates for exactly this.

Not Ready? Pause the Nudge Before It Becomes a Ticket Queue

What you do next depends on where you are with your passkey rollout. If you haven't enabled FIDO2 properly or haven't identified your SMS and Voice users, pause the automatic enablement first. Get sorted, then turn the nudge back on when you're ready for the questions.

Inforcer's own Roy Klooster was one of the first people I know to write about this. The man lives in Graph, and he was quick to surface the property Microsoft uses. There's no portal toggle. It's a Graph PATCH against the authentication methods policy, and it needs Policy.ReadWrite.AuthenticationMethod.

PATCH https://graph.microsoft.com/beta/policies/authenticationmethodspolicy
Content-Type: application/json

{
  "optOutSettings": {
    "passkeyDynamicMigration": true
  }
}

Nudge Is Off. Now Find Everyone Still Using SMS and Voice.

This is where most of the questions are sitting right now. There are three ways in. I use all of them, because each one catches people the others miss.

Microsoft's analyzer script

Microsoft publishes a PowerShell script for this. It needs Global Reader, Authentication Policy Administrator, or Security Reader. Microsoft's own guidance is blunt: any non-zero result means the tenant is in scope.

Daniel Bradley's Authentication Methods report

Daniel Bradley's free, interactive Entra Authentication Methods report is a great place to start.

Authentication Strength + Conditional Access, in report-only

There's also a native approach that works well for catching the people who are actually signing in with SMS and Voice. Big shoutout to Nathan McNulty for the idea.

When you're ready to enforce, the same policy moves from report-only to on. You've already done the testing. I walk through all of this in the video in section 07.

Still Need More? Bring in the Big Guns.

I didn't figure all of this out alone. These are the resources I've gone back to most while working through it.

The Passkey Rollout, With a Side of Ramble

If you're OK listening to me ramble a bit, I walk through the passkey rollout end to end: finding the users, the Authentication Strength approach, and what the experience looks like from the user's side.

Watch on YouTube · Jon Hope

Video not loading? Watch it on YouTube.

Stop Planning Around September 1. Plan Around February 1.

Nobody gets locked out on February 1. Microsoft is clear on that. What happens instead is quieter and, for an MSP, more expensive: every user still relying on Microsoft-provided SMS or Voice gets a passkey registration prompt they can't skip, on whatever device they happen to be holding, on a Monday morning. There's no opt out for that behavior.

The telephony provider option doesn't open until October 30, and it's still in private preview. Microsoft's Message Center post recommends finishing setup at least 4 weeks before February 1, which puts the real target at January 4, 2027. That's about nine weeks after configuration opens, with the holidays in the middle, to pick a provider, sign a contract, and migrate the users who need one. If you're waiting to see what the preview looks like before deciding, you've already used a chunk of that window.

Part 2 picks up from here: what went wrong after September 1, and what SMS costs now.