Shanghai Woman Says Her Toddler Locked Her iPhone for 48 Years

Would you wait nearly 48 years to access your iPhone again? Well, one Shanghai mother might have to.

The woman said she caught her 2-year-old son playing around with her iPhone last month. When she went to unlock her device, she found the following message: “iPhone is disabled. Please wait 25,113,676 minutes and then try again.”

Dumbfounded, the woman took her iPhone to the local Apple Store. But the staff there said her toddler had entered too many incorrect passcodes into the device, triggering a failsafe. Her only two options: wait 48 years, or restore her iPhone back to factory settings — which would erase all of her data.

The woman detailed her conundrum in a Pear Report video, which was spotted by the Shainghaiist.com.

“My phone has many important files, photos, and contacts,” the woman said. “I don’t want to reboot it, but I can’t possibly wait for more than 40 years, by that time I’ll be too old to talk.”

“Am I going have to tell my grandkids, ‘this was all your dad’s fault,” she laughingly told Pear Report.

iOS does have a built-in mechanism that disables the device for a brief period of time after too many incorrect passcodes are inputted. But according to the Global Times, lock-outs that span decades typically indicates that an iPhone has been jailbroken.

“I’ve heard of even worse cases, like 80 years,” smartphone technician Wei Chunlong said in the Pear Report video. Newer iOS versions that haven’t been jailbroken won’t use such staggeringly long wait times, he added.

Generally, if an incorrect passcode is entered into a non-jailbroken iPhone too many times, it will simply lock the device and advise its user to connect to iTunes. Once connected and synced, the user could simply enter the correct password to unlock the iPhone. That’s certainly a lot more convenient than waiting half a century to use your smartphone again.