This weekend, my Mastodon and Thread timelines exploded with people being locked out of their Apple IDs. While it didn’t happen to me, it did to Michael Tsai:
I had another instance of my Apple ID mysteriously being locked. First, my iPhone wanted me to enter the password again, which I thought was the “normal” thing it has done every few months, almost since I got it. But after doing so it said that my account was locked.
Chance Miller also reported on it:
We received our first tip about this around 8 p.m. ET. In the hours since then, the problem has gained significant traction on social media.
Apple’s System Status webpage doesn’t indicate that any of its services are having issues this evening. Still, it’s clear based on social media reports that something wonky is going on behind the scenes at Apple. A few of us here at 9to5Mac have also been directly affected by the problem.
People are being signed out of their Apple ID across all of their devices. If you try to sign in with your original Apple ID password, you’ll be locked out of your account. You’ll then be forced to reset your password before being able to sign back in. There doesn’t appear to be any rhyme or reason as to why this is happening.