Some Apple Users Are Being Mysteriously Locked Out of Their Accounts

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Many Apple users have reportedly been mysteriously locked out of their Apple ID accounts on all of their devices over the past day or so.

It isn’t clear why the lockdowns are occurring, but reports have surfaced on Reddit and Twitter, among other places. While the lockdowns don’t appear to be widespread, enough people have been impacted for it to be significant.

According to impacted users, their devices will ask them to enter their Apple ID and password. After doing so, some users report a pop-up notification will advise them that their Apple ID accounts have been locked for “Security Reasons” and their identity must be verified before access can be restored.

In almost all of the cases, users report needing to reset their Apple ID password to continue with the account unlocking process.

This identity verification process can be started by tapping on the Unlock Account icon in the notification or by going to Apple’s account support web page. The company also has a useful support document on the matter.

It isn’t a tedious process to restore these accounts, but it is an inconvenient one. That’s especially true since some users report needing to repeat the process on every one of their Apple devices.

Again, it’s unclear why this is occurring for a significant number of users at once. The issue may be tied to a bug in Apple’s security protocols, or it could have been the result of a malicious actor attempting to brute force an unknown number of accounts at once.

To add further confusion, the community has not been able to find any pattern between impacted users. None of them report having their data or passwords leaked — and many of them are actively using strong, unique passwords and two-factor authentication.

The issue has been experienced on iPhones, Apple TVs, iPads and Macs. So it’s not likely a problem tied to any particular Apple operating system.

Some users report that they receive an “Account Locked” notification even after they’ve verified their identity, which implies that the issue may be a software bug, but we won’t know for sure until Apple acknowledges or patches the problem.

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