Twitter will now let you turn on two-factor authentication without a phone number

After Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s account was hacked in September owing to a SIM swap fraud , the company has now given users the option of enabling two-factor authentication (2FA) without a phone number.

The  Twitter Safety team has just announced that users will be able to do this from later today.

Until now, a phone number was necessary for enabling 2FA on Twitter. There were options to use third-party authenticators like Google Authenticator, or a hardware authentication device, however, in order to enable them, you had to give your phone number and verify it via SMS.

However, as pointed out by   9To5Mac , this is currently not available if you are using a hardware authentication device. A Twitter engineer tweeted, “Currently, we require you to have a second method along with security keys since the latter isn’t currently supported outside web. If you’d like to disable SMS, you need to also have a mobile security app. We know this might not be ideal but we’re going to keep working on it!”

Hi! Currently we require you to have a second method along with security keys since the latter isn’t currently supported outside web. If you’d like to disable sms, you need to also have a mobile security app. We know this might not be ideal but we’re going to keep working on it!

— Jared Miller (@jcmi) November 21, 2019

Notably, while this feature is rolling out to all users, it is being enabled in phases and may not be available for all immediately.

In October,  Twitter also admitted that it used phone numbers and emails provided two-factor authentication for serving targeted ads .