I’d like to give you an early heads up on a visual design update that is coming to the Office 365 sign-in experience. These are the screens used to sign in to Microsoft’s apps and services, including Office 365, Azure and Dynamics.

We’re updating the default background image on our sign-in screens to something that’s fresher and more performant. The new image is just 1% the size of the previous one, which reduces bandwidth requirements and improves perceived page load times, especially on slower networks.

Sign-in screen with old vs new background images

This is solely a visual user interface (UI) change with no changes to functionality. There is no change to your users if you have configured a custom background image in Company Branding for your tenant. This change will only affect screens where the default background image (screenshot on the left above) shows up today. 

We plan on rolling this out globally in early-April. If this change affects your users, we recommend updating any documentation that contains screenshots and to give your help desk a heads up.