The Meteoric Rise of 2FA

This month, we’ve reached a huge milestone: we’ve hit one million (and growing) unique users using Authy for Two-Factor Authentication!

Back in 2012, when we started Authy we had less than 100 users and, unfortunately, there weren’t many sites you could use two-factor authentication on. In fact, things were so bad that the only site I was able to use 2FA with was GMail. It looked as if we were going to be stuck with passwords forever.

To give you a perspective of what this all has meant, we started 2014 with 320,714 unique users. Today we have 1,023,677. This is an astounding 319% growth in just over 10 months. What does this mean for the overall ecosystem? We are approaching a point of no return – soon passwords by themselves will be irrelevant and our apps and data will be more secure.

There are many reasons for this meteoric growth. 2014 was plagued with security breaches. We saw the famous Hollywood celeb photo scandals. Technology giants like iCloud and eBay were compromised. These events brought the need for better authentication to the spotlight. The general population started to understand that passwords may have been a good idea more than 20 years ago, but the internet is a much more complex and insecure place than it used to be. For the first time, we saw Tim Cook, the CEO of the biggest tech company in the world, talk about the need for two-factor authentication on live TV.

With that, I want to close up by thanking you all. All of us at Authy are very grateful for each one of you. To all of our customers for trusting us and to all of our users for helping us with your feedback and support — a million thanks to you all!