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Apple ID Accounts Logging Out Users and Requiring Password Reset

Maybe it only affects some people and not everybody because once apple found out about it, they put a stop to it before it affected more people.

They probably had an apple exec with the issue and he or she said "WTF is this? Stop it now."
 
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With some folk being locked out for multiple days and support unable to help, I suspect Apple either have no idea what's happening or they are too scared to tell anyone.
 
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Squirrrrel said:
This kind of thing rarely ever happens and people make a way bigger deal out of it than it needs to be, especially here
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Apple of course isn't the first provider of cloud services to have issues leading to disruption on a significant scale, but rightly or wrongly it does have a better reputation of reliability and trust than most. And for those who are all in on Apple devices and services, the Apple ID does play a larger role in their digital world than say Dropbox (for example) would. I feel this escapade will be damaging, and the most damaging aspect will be the amount of time Apple is keeping people in the dark about what's going on.

MajorFusion said:
It did make me realize how dependent I am on one account and that it's probably not as robust as it needs to be for that level of trust.
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I imagine the blog writers at Synology and Nextcloud and the like will be chomping at the bit to get back to work tomorrow!
 
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ozaz said:
Apple of course isn't the first provider of cloud services to have issues leading to disruption on a significant scale, but rightly or wrongly it does have a better reputation of reliability and trust than most. And for those who are all in on Apple devices and services, the Apple ID does play a larger role in their digital world than say Dropbox (for example) would. I feel this escapade will be damaging, and the most damaging aspect will be the amount of time Apple is keeping people in the dark about what's going on.
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Apple saying absolutely nothing so far is certainly horrible.
 
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ozaz said:
I feel this escapade will be damaging, and the most damaging aspect will be the amount of time Apple is keeping people in the dark about what's going on.
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I understand where you are coming from with your analysis and I agree this might end up tarnishing the reputation of Apple.

However, bear in mind that when an attack is actively ongoing, it is usually best to communicate as to not needlessly inform your adversaries on what you know or might be doing. The best course of action is typically to remediate first and to clue transparent after.

I’d much rather know they are keeping my account safe than have them waste resources trying to explain something which is likely highly technical and which most regular users will not understand or care about.
 
This has not happened to me, but it's a wake-up call.

Luckily, I don't use my Apple-ID for emails, passwords (keychain) or for logging in to other services. I do use it for photos, but I export those to my laptop regularly.

I'm now in the process of disabling the new "Stolen Device Protection" feature which I had enabled as soon as it was available, thinking it was a good idea. Now, I want to ensure I can (a) live without a working Apple-ID and (b) can change the password easily. What a mess.
 
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Tim has to go!

Nothing happened here, but I will follow this closely.
This is things that are NOT supposed to happen at all.
I never use stolen device protection though, it gave me some trouble at some time, so I turned it all off.

I’m so sorry for all of you that have had yours security compromised.
 
adrianlondon said:
I'm now in the process of disabling the new "Stolen Device Protection" feature
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I'm primarily an Android user so don't have this. But I wish Google would introduce an equivalent feature and I'd keep it enabled personally. I'd rather have a few hours of inconvenience caused by stolen device protection than the potentially much larger issues that could arise if someone steals your device and device pin/password, opening up the potential for account takeover.
 
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Boing123 said:
I understand where you are coming from with your analysis and I agree this might end up tarnishing the reputation of Apple.

However, bear in mind that when an attack is actively ongoing, it is usually best to communicate as to not needlessly inform your adversaries on what you know or might be doing. The best course of action is typically to remediate first and to clue transparent after.

I’d much rather know they are keeping my account safe than have them waste resources trying to explain something which is likely highly technical and which most regular users will not understand or care about.
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The phrasing I used isn't quite what I meant. At this stage I don't expect them to go into a full explanation about what's going on, I meant more of an acknowledgement that there is an issue and engineers are working to resolve it.
Something along the lines of "we are aware of an issue that's requiring some customers to reset their apple id passwords. Our engineers are currently working to resolve the issue". Instead customers seem to be calling Apple support and (based on accounts written here and elsewhere) the support staff don't even seem to be aware there is a widespread issue.
 
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ozaz said:
I'm primarily an Android user so don't have this. But I wish Google would introduce an equivalent feature and I'd keep it enabled personally. I'd rather have a few hours of inconvenience caused by stolen device protection than the potentially much larger issues that could arise if someone steals your device and device pin/password, opening up the potential for account takeover.
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I'll re-enable it once this issue, re: Apple-IDs being randomly locked out, is over.
 
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Yep - happened to me too … was not happy and it freaked me out. At least it was obviously an Apple issue and I was not hacked. I have an old .me and use .mac as my current address and I am head of the family account too.
 
I have always found this control they have very concerning. Activation lock, remote lockout, all stuff that often harms innocent users particularly the elderly. I can imagine one day they will have a colossal server meltdown and all devices globally will be remote wiped or something!
 
I suspect it just affected users who enabled stolen device protection. I am not affected and have and old ‘me’ email but have disabled stolen device protection.
 
Same thing, locked me out of everything and forced me to reset my password. I was putting kids to bed and thought I was getting hacked, which made no sense since my password is 70 digits long and not used anywhere else. I use gmail, so it has nothing to do with @me.com accounts.

Good thing it happened though, made me realize I had an old yubikey registered which I no longer used.
 
I had the same issue, Mobile Me account but it screwed up all my HomePods all day yesterday. Returned to my original password on Saturday. Required me to reset my two original HomePods, the minis and second generation HomePod had less issues but acted screwy with account issues all day.

Have a second home and all my apple devices there are offline now.
 
There is obviously a large number of people affected by this, but there are two levels of issues.

The first and clearly larger group is locked out of their account and are prompted to unlock their accounts, and required to change their passwords and all the hassles of then having to renew their app-specific passwords.

Seemingly a second much smaller subset of folks, myself included, are not even able to unlock, not because we don’t have the device, password, unlock code, and phone number, but because the unlock process fails with a error that apple can’t seem to explain. In fact they tentatively closed my ticket by sending a generic “if you continue to have problems reach us at -link-“, which I of course had to be sent to a gmail account because apple mail, which has been my primary email for 20 years, doesn’t work. The support supervisor told me to wait 24 hours and then try again and if it still does not work then call them back.

I have had to unlock and change passwords in the past year or so for the same reason and, while it was a hassle, at least there was a solution!
 
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