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steemax

macrumors regular
Original poster
I just received my iPhone 7, first thing I did was restore from backup and my iMessage wouldn't activate. Just says "an error occurred during activation". I tried every which technique but nothing works. The only thing that worked was setting up the phone as new. It activated but after about an hour of use it's back to the same thing. It's driving me crazy! I've been fighting with it for the past couple hours. It was all working just fine all day on my SE.
 
I just received my iPhone 7, first thing I did was restore from backup and my iMessage wouldn't activate. Just says "an error occurred during activation". I tried every which technique but nothing works. The only thing that worked was setting up the phone as new. It activated but after about an hour of use it's back to the same thing. It's driving me crazy! I've been fighting with it for the past couple hours. It was all working just fine all day on my SE.

Im having the same problem. I called my carrier but they said it's not their problem, it's Apple's.

I tried reverting to iOS 9.3.5 but it still doesn't activate. It's been like this since yesterday.
 
If you are using the same line as your SE, try putting your sim from the SE in the new phone and reboot
 
I turned off iMessage and FaceTime, rebooted, then enabled both. Took a while but they finally activated.
 
I had to use old SIM card. My phone kept saying it couldn't send MMS messages. I tried entering my number manually in the General Settings, but that didn't work either. I took out my old SIM from my old phone, popped in the new one, everything instantly worked like a charm.
 
You can also try to reset network settings. Settings/general/scroll to the bottom tap reset/reset network settings
 
Thanks for all the input guys... just to update, I was using the SIM out of my SE from the get-go. eventually it finally activated and stuck a couple hours later. I guess it was just a lot of backup on the servers from everyone activating their phones.
 
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