Overnight, many people reported on social media that they were inexplicably logged out of their Apple IDs and then required to reset their passwords when they tried to sign in again, and nobody seems to know why. Some reported needing to enter their iPhone passcode to connect to iCloud again, while others with Stolen Device Protection enabled said they had to wait an hour before being able to log in.
Apple’s System Status webpage shows no current issues with any of its services, so it’s not clear if this was a widespread issue. That said, 9to5Mac reports that even a few of its staff members were also affected by the issue. At least one Forbes contributor apparently experienced the issue as well. The outlet saw no indication that this was related to the password reset attacks that several publications, including Forbes, covered in March.
One Mastodon user said they were told by an Apple support team member that “sometimes random security improvements are added to your account,” while on Reddit, a person posted today in a thread about the issue that Apple support told them their password “was changed around midnight.”
Some people said they also had to reset their app-specific passwords for third-party apps that access their Apple ID (email clients, for example).
Not everyone was forced to change their passwords, however, as the person posting in the above Threads post said a password reset was only “suggested,” not required.
Mac developer Michael Tsai wrote up a blog post about dealing with the issue. In “another instance of my Apple ID mysteriously being locked,” he said he had to wait an hour to reset because of Stolen Device Protection, Apple’s new security feature to keep iPhone owners’ iCloud accounts protected in the event their phones are stolen. Evidently, the feature only listed a grocery store Tsai visits every couple of weeks as one of the non-configurable locations where the one-hour delay for password resets wouldn’t be enforced.
Apple did not respond immediately to The Verge’s request for comment. In the meantime, as frustrating as the issue sounds, at least not everyone had to deal with it in hard mode: