The Authr Journal

Notes on holding the keys

Engineering deep-dives, launches, and opinions about identity, written by the people who operate it, since 2022.

Perspectives·Jun 30, 2026

The state of enterprise identity, 2026

Halfway through 2026, identity has become the control plane for everything, including a workforce that is no longer entirely human.

Maya Lindqvist

6 min read

All Engineering Product Security Company Perspectives

20262 posts

Engineering

Scaling to 5 billion monthly authentications

The architecture decisions, near-misses, and cell migrations behind growing authentication volume forty-fold in four years without an SLA breach.

Tomás HerreraMay 19, 2026

Product

Introducing Authr for AI Agents

Scoped, revocable, fully audited identities for the software agents your teams are already deploying, generally available today.

Sarah ChenFeb 10, 2026

20254 posts

Perspectives

Agentic identity: when your users aren't human

Service accounts were built for software that does the same thing forever; agents improvise, and our identity models are not ready.

Daniel OkaforOct 21, 2025

Engineering

Postmortem culture at Authr

How a company whose product must not go down learns from the times it almost does, without burning the people involved.

Tomás HerreraJul 31, 2025

Product

Adaptive MFA: risk signals without the false positives

Step-up challenges only matter if users trust them, so we rebuilt our risk engine around precision and measured the result.

Sarah ChenApr 15, 2025

Company

Our $150M Series C: identity is just getting started

Crestline Partners leads our Series C at a $2.1B valuation, and here is precisely what we intend to do with it.

Maya LindqvistJan 28, 2025

20245 posts

Security

Authr + FedRAMP: our public-sector roadmap

We are formally In Process for FedRAMP Moderate, and this post lays out the scope, timeline, and what it means for customers.

Priya RaghavanDec 5, 2024

Perspectives

The hidden cost of building auth in-house

The build-versus-buy math for enterprise identity fails not at the estimate, but in years two through ten.

Maya LindqvistSep 18, 2024

Engineering

Why we run our own certificate authority

A tour of Authr's internal PKI: why public CAs were the wrong tool, and what running our own actually requires.

Elena VasquezJun 25, 2024

Engineering

Zero-downtime key rotation, explained

How Authr rotates token signing keys under live traffic, and why the hard part is everyone else's cache.

Daniel OkaforApr 11, 2024

Product

Introducing Directory Sync 2.0: SCIM at Fortune-500 scale

A rebuilt sync engine with ordering guarantees, dry runs, and the throughput to onboard six-figure directories in hours.

Sarah ChenJan 30, 2024

20234 posts

Product

Passkeys in the enterprise: what we learned from 40 pilots

Field notes from 40 enterprise passkey pilots: what delighted users, what stalled rollouts, and what we changed because of it.

Sarah ChenOct 17, 2023

Engineering

How we cut p99 token latency to 38ms

A six-month latency hunt through signing queues, cold caches, and one shameful mutex, measured at the p99 where users actually live.

Tomás HerreraAug 22, 2023

Security

Announcing SOC 2 Type II

Authr has completed its first SOC 2 Type II audit with zero exceptions, and here is what the report covers.

Priya RaghavanMay 9, 2023

Perspectives

SAML is 20 years old. It runs the Fortune 500 anyway.

The protocol everyone loves to bury turns twenty this year, and it still fronts more enterprise logins than anything else.

Priya RaghavanFeb 14, 2023

20222 posts

Engineering

The anatomy of an enterprise SSO outage

A field guide to how single sign-on fails in the wild, drawn from the incidents we see across hundreds of IdP integrations.

Daniel OkaforNov 3, 2022

Company

Hello, world: why we're building Authr

Three years after founding Authr, we are finally starting a blog, and the first post is the argument for the company.

Maya LindqvistAug 16, 2022