Several Apple customers were inexplicably locked out of their Apple ID accounts Friday evening in a major service disruption, forcing them to reset their passwords across all devices and services.
According to user reports on social media, the widespread outage began around 8 p.m. ET. People complained that they were abruptly signed out of their Apple IDs on Macs, iPhones, iPads, and other Apple devices. When attempting to sign back in with their existing passwords, they received an error message preventing access.
“I was mid FaceTime and my Apple account got locked and signed out of all my Apple products,” posted @MaxWinebach on X
To regain access, users had to go through Apple’s account recovery process to reset their Apple ID passwords. However, many reported difficulties even completing the reset process initially due to high demand.
“Hey @AppleSupport all of my Apple products suddenly decided to lock me out of my Apple ID and asked me to re-verify my account. Except my password doesn’t work when I am 100% certain it is correct I get an error. What’s going on? I can’t even reset my password!,” wrote another user.
The outage affected iCloud services like iCloud Drive, iMessage, FaceTime, and the App Store. Third-party apps and services that integrate with Apple ID sign-in were also disrupted for those impacted.
Apple has not provided an explanation for the service issues so far. The company’s system status page displayed no official acknowledgment of problems with any of its services or systems throughout the incident.
While authentication outages occur occasionally for major tech platforms, this appeared to be a prevalent event impacting a huge number of Apple’s customer base across multiple product lines and services. The last time such a significant simultaneous lockout occurred was in 2017.
The outage comes at a time when Apple is currently grappling with Active Theft issues that have allowed bad actors to compromise Apple IDs and lock victims out of their devices. However, it’s unclear if Friday’s events were related to those previous attacks.
Whether an internal system error or external attack was to blame remains unknown. Widespread authentication system failures are concerning for any tech company due to security and privacy risks of unauthorized account access during an incident.
Users impacted by the outage expressed frustration at Apple’s lack of official communication about the situation and their inability to access devices and cloud services critical to their digital lives. Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
According to user reports on social media, the widespread outage began around 8 p.m. ET. People complained that they were abruptly signed out of their Apple IDs on Macs, iPhones, iPads, and other Apple devices. When attempting to sign back in with their existing passwords, they received an error message preventing access.
“I was mid FaceTime and my Apple account got locked and signed out of all my Apple products,” posted @MaxWinebach on X
To regain access, users had to go through Apple’s account recovery process to reset their Apple ID passwords. However, many reported difficulties even completing the reset process initially due to high demand.
“Hey @AppleSupport all of my Apple products suddenly decided to lock me out of my Apple ID and asked me to re-verify my account. Except my password doesn’t work when I am 100% certain it is correct I get an error. What’s going on? I can’t even reset my password!,” wrote another user.
The outage affected iCloud services like iCloud Drive, iMessage, FaceTime, and the App Store. Third-party apps and services that integrate with Apple ID sign-in were also disrupted for those impacted.
Apple has not provided an explanation for the service issues so far. The company’s system status page displayed no official acknowledgment of problems with any of its services or systems throughout the incident.
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The outage comes at a time when Apple is currently grappling with Active Theft issues that have allowed bad actors to compromise Apple IDs and lock victims out of their devices. However, it’s unclear if Friday’s events were related to those previous attacks.
Whether an internal system error or external attack was to blame remains unknown. Widespread authentication system failures are concerning for any tech company due to security and privacy risks of unauthorized account access during an incident.
Users impacted by the outage expressed frustration at Apple’s lack of official communication about the situation and their inability to access devices and cloud services critical to their digital lives. Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
