There was an error connecting to the apple ID server - please help

[Jaygle]

Hi all,

first post so apologies if i do something wrong.

I was looking for things to keep me busy during lock down so I picked up my old MacBook Pro 2012, it switched on OK but I cannot seem to get the password right to get logged in. No problem I thought, I'll just reset it, typed in my apple ID and password (I know these are right, I logged in to my apple account online to make sure) and all I keep getting now is 'There was an error connecting to the Apple ID server'.

Can anyone help ? I've searched the internet and this forum but cant find a solution, any help would be appreciated, thanks in advance

J

 

[Jaygle]

Found the solution if anyone else needs it. Worked perfectly for me.


The error message is a bit misleading but what happens is when the computer tries to connect to iCloud the server will use a certificate to secure the connection, if the date and time on the server, client computer and certificate doesn't match, the connection will fail.

You can set time in terminal (you can use terminal on the recovery partition) with the following command:

date {month}{day}{hour}{minute}{year}

Every bracket should be replaced with a two-digit number. For example, August 9th 2016 14:29 would become the following command:

date 0809142916