Apple card disabled my iCloud, App Store, and Apple ID accounts (2021)
dcurt.is
dcurt.is
Allegedly unrelated to the apple card, your appleid just gets locked if you don't fulfill a trade-in.
Apple Card Disabled My iCloud, App Store, and Apple ID Accounts - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26310817 - March 2021 (302 comments)
Lots of red flags here on the author's part. This seems like a case of someone not following through on their tradein, missing a payment due to a changed bank account, and then ignoring Apple’s emails about the issue.
The author makes it sound like Apple acted out of nowhere, but the reality is they gave notice and took action only after the author failed to respond. If you don’t return a trade-in and your card goes past due, it makes sense that Apple would revoke access to services tied to that purchase. Framing it as Apple “holding accounts hostage” feels misleading—it looks more like the natural result of missed obligations and poor follow-up.
And no, it doesn’t make sense for Apple to disable most of the services in case a credit card is past due for a few days.
I'm also not sure why the author didn't follow up: not following up has the direct consequence of being charged a substantial amount of money.
The linkage between the card and the account doesn't actually seem important here. They locked the account that the unpaid iPhone was set up with. Why would Apple continue to provide service to an account that was being used by a device that was effectively partially stolen from them?
Moreover, cars are much more easily repossessed than phones and laptops.
Society has decided that defaulting on a car loan is not equivalent to stealing a car. This is why you can still go to jail for the latter even though debtor's prisons were abolished.
> Moreover, cars are much more easily repossessed than phones and laptops.
Sure, let's go that route instead. Should they be able to repossess your paid-off Corolla because you defaulted on payments for your Camry?
The problem is that Apple didn't just disable these services on the device he didn't pay for. They disabled them even on the devices he did pay for.
> Should your Corolla's cloud based gps routing stop working when you break your contract with Toyota over your Camry? Arguably yes. The car didn't default on the loan, you did. You broke your contract, why would you expect the other party to continue allowing you to be their customer?
Because the contract says what happens if you default, and that isn't one of the things it says.
Moreover, you sign a contract when you agree to the terms of the purchase, as well as the trade in. None of this is a surprise.
Across the board, the author didn't read.
I’ve personally experienced two occasions where iPhones have been stolen in transit by FedEx personnel — one vanished and one, bound for an Apple repair facility in Pennsylvania, was delivered to a residential address a few miles from my city.
In neither case was Apple aware, which was surprising to me as they typically have their shit together. I only realized there was an issue on the one occasion where they were going to charge me for a replacement device, and checking the tracking indicated the phone was delivered to a stay at home mom. The whole process must be outsourced to a meh contractor, and insurance cleans up the mess.
I agree with you that Apple taking action on the account is not wholly unreasonable. What I found shocking was the inability to contact someone who could resolve the situation. I know this is a common issue with Google, but had expected Apple to be different.
But they did. The first person was unfamiliar with the issue, likely because the Apple Card program was relatively new at the time. They opened a case to escalate.
Apple’s phone support has been relatively good in my experience. I expect they’d have this situation more integrated into first-line support in 2025 than they did when the program was new.
Identity services from the large companies are very convenient, but the citizens of Google, or Apple, or Microsoft are largely faceless and rightless citizens of a corporation with no ability to contact anyone for anything.
The story and lesson is simple is to tie as little as possible to identity systems using a domain you don't own.
This isn't a statement of expecting perfection from any group, just the opposite, of knowing that things can happen unexpectedly, where is the middle ground in a relationship that impacts the user more than the company if the ID is lost.
Good job blaming the victim. Hail corporate, I guess
The missed notification is something that we have to take the author's word for, but it could very well be true. Perhaps I'm more sympathetic because I ran into a similar situation recently. I called a company because I hadn't received a bill, was told that they recently sold off the relevant division, and that they sent me an email explaining how to switch my billing information over to the new owner. I don't recall receiving such an email. If it did hit my inbox, it was likely deleted. I would have regarded such an email as a phishing attempt without a second glance. The situation may have been different for the article's author, but they may have still had a legitimate reason for missing it.
Apple's response was also excessive. I would expect them to lose subscription services, but not access to their accounts. At in my experience, my Apple accounts remain active even though my last hardware purchase from them was well over a decade ago. (Clearly I am not receiving subscription services, but the accounts still exist and my purchases are still accessible.)
While Apple's response is nowhere near Google's (e. g. the customer was able to find out what the problem was and resolve it), it sounds like Apple overstepped bounds.
block the device, sure. send collections after him for the unpaid amount, sure.
retaliating by blocking all his unrelated, paid for, accounts is yet another reason apple should be broken up. it also doesn't sound like they refunded him for the days of usage that were lost that surely still had to be paid for.
Most Google users don’t pay a dime for their services. I don’t think it’s reasonable to mandate customer service for free users.
They’re not a charity. But they also don’t owe their users for what’s tendered for free.
Where I’d agree with OP is in requiring extensive CS for paying users.
Ban gmail addresses being used for government services, banking, health, utilities etc if they don't want to dip into the staggering profits they generate off these "free" users to guarantee basic rights and recourse from their own systems.
https://proton.me/support/contact?topic=Other
> If you would prefer to contact us without using this form, you can email us at support@protonmail.zendesk.com. You can visit this page for more options.
...those more options:
> You can still contact us directly
> All support requests are handled in-house by Proton, but if you have specific concerns and would like to keep your query within Proton Mail (that is, not using Zendesk), you can email us directly at contact@proton.me.
> Yen says that "at least 95%" of ProtonMail users don't pay for any services.
https://www.axios.com/2021/11/09/privacy-business-booming-pr...
It's not for free, why do you keep repeating this line? Google isn't offering charitable good and services to people.
Nobody is forcing you to give things for free, so, you're responsible for those customers as much as you are for the paying ones.
And actually, it is not for free.
The only other large company that I have similar experiences with is our ISP (KPN in NL) who are also really easy to get hold off and very helpful (down to helping you hook up your own fiber equipment).
I don't want to log in with my Google account, pay with Apple, get phone service from Paypal, or use my bank's app store. It's much less hassle to deal with a problem affecting only one of those than losing them all at once.
Certainly. Except their mistake had beyond-reasonable consequences, since account termination would result them losing access to: their phone, their laptops, their TV smart pucks, their tablets, their smart speakers, their photos, any accounts on websites if they logged in using Sign in with Apple, any accounts on websites if they were using Hide My Mail...
Once you are in Apple jail, it's on Apple to have a good process to follow to try to go back to good standing. OP was met with a black box that may or may not read their internal Apple mail. They may or may not reply either.
The moral to draw from this blogpost is to be careful of putting too many eggs on the same corporate basket. Though in theory you are good as long as you pay your bills, there is no banhammer with an accuracy stat of 100%!
I've been on the receiving end of a false-positive fraud flag on my Amazon account (literally undeserved), it ended with my account being terminated and me being banned from the store. The blast radius was bigger than expected:
- It forced a factory reset on all my Amazon Echos at 03:00AM (fun to be woken up to a house-wide symphony of smart speakers OOBE-ing at the same time).
- It immediately negated my ability to exercise warranty consumer rights on most of my tech devices, as they were purchased on Amazon.
- It also blocked from cancelling my Amazon recurring subscriptions, so I spent two more weeks receiving things like soap and cat food despite the account termination supposedly cancelling all outstanding orders. Support was unresponsive the whole time.
- It immediately terminated my (luckily personal!) AWS resources, as these are also umbrella'd under the same account.
No amount of email reading could have saved me since I did nothing wrong (still have all the receipts, but I'm a stranger on the Internet so caveat emptor). All I ever got back from the different tiers of customer support were different ways of saying you are bad and we don't need to listen nor explain, we are done bye bye.
> We’ve been unable to collect full payment for your new iPhone. As a result, we will block the device on the order from further access to the Apple iTunes and Mac App stores, and disable all accounts associated with the device purchased on the order.
Apple is retroactively making everything you've ever bought from them, even things you've fully paid for and owned outright, be the collateral for whatever payment you're currently behind on. If this weren't "do it on a computer", it would be obviously ridiculous. Imagine that you bought a new sink from Lowe's, defaulted on your Lowe's credit card, and so they came to rip the deck off of your house since you built it with lumber that you bought from them (and paid for) a few years ago.
Companies like Apple. Microsoft, Google, Meta, et al. have the money to spend on better customer support, but they don't because they have a monopoly. They know they can do whatever they want and there's nothing we can do. But even worse, they have absolute and total control and then hide behind their lack of customer support.
I think there should be a law that states that once you become large enough or important enough, you MUST reach a certain level of competent customer support or you will get fined the amount of money it will cost to pay for this competent customer support.
The reason why they get around bad customer support is because they are large enough so that they can bully billions of people by threatening to cut off access. Talk to Youtubers that get mysteriously cut off with no customer support to talk to.
This is all because of customer support. Smaller companies need to invest in customer support because of competition but not these larger companies because they don't have real competition, and something needs to change to force them to do it.
But what about a $100 recovery fee? Then the problem becomes "how do you prove its your account"? There's a wide variety of jurisdictions and id mechanisms, can "ogle" manage all that? I don't know, I'm not close to even talking about "faang" or whatever let alone work at one. So many transactions happen nowadays with these systems that are long strings of rube goldberg machines helped by "AI" that is actually not that intelligent. Is it financially possible to even run these megacorps without the ability to discard problem "customers"? Can you build customer support processes and staff at this sort of scale? Even setting up new billing for what was previously a free account seems sort of daunting.
I guess I'm saying that I'm not so sure that these megacorps "have the money to spend on better customer support," except in the apple case, their customer base is so "unfree" and high margin that I don't understand why they would have a problem, even if repairing an account required a fee for some sort of id verification which seems to be the crucial thing here. They are obviously well positioned with their per customer costs and apple id stuff.
I had some random Apple charge not go through (IIRC it was my monthly iPhone Citizen One bill that was paid on my Apple Card but the Apple Card rejected the payment???). And it fouled up things in odd ways that were not clear at all from any UI I could access.
In the end I had to keep clicking a "retry" payment in some obscure corner of Apple's account management with zero info on if it worked or not then wait a few days to see if I got another scary email from Apple. It ended up working out without my needing to call support so I don't know if they would have been helpful.
I will say, my experiences with Apple support have been largely positive to amazing. Their business support (ABM) is so good I felt like I was getting away with a massive heist getting the amount of help I got as a single-person LLC. Almost instant answer of the phone, clear audio, easy to understand support person, incredibly knowledgeable (used all the right industry terms), and gave me the info I needed to go smack AT&T (read more about here [0]). 10/10 experience.
True. I've used the FCC and CFPB in the past and while the UI to interface with them is somewhat clunky, it's functional and in all 3 cases I was satisfied (vindicated). In at least 1 of the cases the monetary value was low enough that it was absolutely in my best interests just to pay it and make it go away but it felt so good to have the CFPB slap down Spectrum and get them to drop the fee. It makes me sick to my stomach to think of what's going to happen to those agencies over the next few years.
Most recently, California’s Department of Insurance helped me when State Farm was being a thorn in my side: https://honeypot.net/2024/04/08/i-fought-state.html
Sometimes the only way to fight bureaucracy is with a bigger bureau.
I was able to talk to an Apple rep and get a kit sent out and get the credit re-added. This was in 2024.
Pretty easy.
I 100% commiserate with the author and have missed important stuff before, but yeah, this article reminds me of the importance of making a habit to read the emails from my "important" accounts each morning. I setup some guardrails to help save myself from my own humanity, e.g. monthly "pay CC" calendar events.
I would not expect to get locked out of my cloud storage, app store, email, etc....
Those are serious consequences, but they're localized to the specific thing or service at issue. You don't lose access to your car because you fail to pay rent on your storage unit. Your house doesn't get foreclosed because your car gets repossessed.
We really need a concept like separation of powers inside companies too, otherwise we end up with corporate dictatorships.
I don't know what's rotten- it can't be a lack of expertise, it must be a separate department with a broken culture. But I don't rely on them for anything crucial
Have moved or purchased alternates to digital assets. Nothing is held behind the Apple/Google/MS wall.
> As it turns out, my bank account number changed in January, causing Apple Card autopay to fail. Then the Apple Store made a charge on the card. Less than fifteen days after that, my App Store, iCloud, Apple Music, and Apple ID accounts had all been disabled by Apple Card.
There are few bills you can just ignore without consequence.
The problem is if something goes wrong with amazon, google or apple, you can get locked into a giant hole.
If you're ok with being treated that way, that's fine - I'm not.
Either way, it doesn't actually matter - even if it's 100% the author's fault, NINE days to get to a human who can resolve the issue is enough of a reason to avoid having too many of your services centralized with apple.
Given the entire post is them making dumb errors and then blaming others it would be in line with the rest of it.
sounds like the apple support person never thought to ask or check if they had unpaid bills for those frozen services. (facepalm)
Yeah, that was a little surprising to me too. One would imagine that ones iCloud or Apple account would have everything in one place on Apple's side. The support person should have been able to pull up the account and see some reference number related to the incomplete trade-in, the bounced payment, and some status message about the account being auto-locked due to missing payment.
If the support person saw a normal, unaffected account - that makes me think visibility into the account is restricted into support tiers and the person should had the ability to escalate or request (logged) access to more details. It's a shame it took the author multiple days and calls into different departments to find resolution for what should have been a very obvious payment problem.
Which is: sure, you're a tech company wanting to change the world. And, sure, this will ruffle some feathers and break a few eggs by design, but: the least you can do is stand up for your customers, right?
So: if your actual customers want to urgently talk to you about, ehm, things, how do you enable this? And, how do you communicate the outcomes to the wider world?
Bad examples abound. But how would you do better?
Which is what most companies actually do, including Apple. Uncontactable companies like Google aren’t the norm.
I understand and share the frustration that email and chat work poorly, but unfortunately that’s often how it is. If you need help, your best bet is usually to call. It doesn’t sound like this guy ever did that.