Accountsd Mac cpu is high

Had the same issue, the only thing that solved it is logging out and in fron appleID ...

Just go to `preferences > AppleID > Overview > disconnect`

And then reconnect from the same `overview` pane.

Thanks to all previous answers, thanks Apple for ... staying quiet ...

It seems that everything it's just a temporary relief from the problem!

In my case I reinstalled 10.15.7 from scratch last sunday and everything went well until this morning, when I found accountsd running at 500% of CPU usage.

I'm really baffled by Apple's behaviour (or better say "un-behaviour"): not a single official word about the issue. But I assume that's the new way: we've already paid. :-(

Right now I'm (we are...) stuck with a machine that's potentially about to become unusable in every moment. The only way to keep working is to keep an eye on the commerce process and the other eye on the CPU load and kill the first when the latter goes beyond 100%...

Any tip to wake up Apple?

I never thought I would live to see times when Windows is faster and more stable then macOS.

Problem appear with any reason. Just like that. It's related with your great Apple ID. DO SOMETHING WITH THAT! People pay a lot of money for your devices to work on it and can't because your quality control department since few year is a bunch of amateurs.

Again & again &again....

This problem started 4 days ago, NVRAM thing didn't work so I deleted the entire Keychain (nightmare).

2 days ago again this problem, so logged out of Apple ID, reboot safe mode, login back, reboot again and it's solved

Today again the same problem, performed a SMC reset and back to normal...

Now just waiting to see what happens tomorrow :(

I did this file backup which removed all my Internet accounts, so I then restored the backup file back and I haven’t seen the issue since (24hrs and counting). Note, I did this on all user accounts on the max

Problem not limited to 10.15.7.... one of the devices in our company under 10.15.6 had exactly same symptoms.

Could be related to MS Exchange accounts on the devices, but no evidence yet. Two newly installed OSX devices on 10.15.7 without an active icloud account had no problems.

I solved the same issue with macOS Catalina 10.15.7 on my MacBook 2018 in the next way:

1) Sign out from iCloud

2) Execute this command using Terminal:

mkdir ~/Library/Accounts/Backup && cp ~/Library/Accounts/Accounts4.sqlite* "$_" && rm ~/Library/Accounts/Accounts4.sqlite*

3) Restart

4) Sign in to iCloud

I have had this same problem with accountsd and commerce using up the CPU, and commerce constantly downloading something since I updated to 10.15.7.

I tried reinstalling the 10.15.7 combo update as suggested below, and this fixed the problem for a couple of days, but then it came back same as before. I don't use iCloud drive (it's disabled), so at least for me I don't think it's related to that as some have suggested.

What I've tried now is to use Little Snitch to block the commerce process from network access. After doing this and restarting the problem with accountsd and commerce has not reappeared for me. While I can't see any immediate other problems this has caused, commerce is supposed to handle App Store transactions etc so it's probably not a good long term solution to keep it away from the net. But at least for me it has worked as a temporary workaround for the problem while I wait for Apple to fix the real problem.

I have the same problem with my Macbook pro 2017. I did a factory reset and installed the combo update.

However it did not work, the problem came back yesterday. I had to disable permanently all accounts including my apple ID. Shame on you apple!

Happy it worked for you, but for me the problem with accountsd going crazy started after i had 10.15.7 already installed. It was not because of the update, though. The problem appeared after I accepted switching iCloud security to 2FA on iPhone. After that, macOS wanted me a fresh login for iCloud services (whicht makes sense, security-wise) but macOS got stuck - it never accepted my new login, there seems to be some bug in the routine. And accountsd started and I could only continue working (I need this machine for work) when I logged out all iCloud services. I hope for some update, because this bug is really annoying (I need iCloud for work too!)

I just has this issue appear for the second time. The first time, nothing would fix it. I tried resetting NVRAM/PRAM, resetting the SMC, safe boot, signing out of iCloud, and more... ended up having to restore from backup. Now it has happened again for the second time, and I’ve thing I have noticed is that both this time and last time, I had been in Windows 10 (bootcamp).

i don’t know what else to do but restore again from time machine. But I won’t be going into Windows for a while.

Just because this problem went away so easily for you doesn‘t mean there ist no problem for others. For me logging out of iCloud fixed the problem too, but when I logged in 24hours later (after two restarts) the brandnew Macbook was unusable again. And I need iCloud for work

Killing the "commerce" process when the "accountsd" is pumping seems to work.

... sometimes for a day and sometimes for 1 minute or less.

I had to force-quit Safari and kill that process 4 times in order to be able to post this message.

Not sure how this issue has not been already fixed by Apple...

Killing the commerce process (or any other solution presented here and elsewhere) didn’t work for me. I’ll be installing the OS and applications from scratch today only moving documents and the like from backup. Going to take forever, but oh well.

I have the same problem. My macBook is stuck (sometimes only the Mail app) and access to IMAP or SMTP accounts is rejected. It got even worse after I changed the provider for one of my e-mail-accounts. The credentials are the same — only the SMTP and IMAP hosts have changed. That was too much for accountd and Mail. I've got to delete the whole account on my Mac and set it up freshly. Still — sometimes Mail cannot connect to the mail server.