What actually breaks when an organisation goes passwordless

Three organisations shared their rollout data with us. In all three, more than 90% of staff enrolled without a support ticket, and every serious problem showed up afterwards.

Recovery is the whole difficulty

A password can be reset by someone who knows a secret. A passkey has to be re-established by proving identity through another channel, and most help desks were not built for that.

Shared workstations were the second surprise: nurses, warehouse staff and lab technicians rotate through machines in ways that passkey UX rarely anticipates.

Passwordless does not remove the recovery problem. It concentrates it.

All three organisations kept a break-glass path. All three said keeping it was the decision that made the rollout survivable.