An unknown error occurred while signing into apple id

Question

Level 1

20 points

An unknown error occurred while signing into apple id

Yesterday my mom got a prompt to sign in to her apple id when she tried to send a text through Messages. It gave the "An unknown error occurred while signing into apple id." I have never had this happen before with any Mac I've owned in my life (and we've had them since the 90s). I immediately restarted and also tried shutting off wi-fi and turning it back on since I read it can sometimes be an Internet connection issue

I proceeded to scour the Internet for fixes. I've tried nearly everything including deleting the related keychain files and preference files associated with it. I restarted each time after doing so. No dice. I created a new admin account and tried to sign in there, nope. I tried signing into the new account using MY Apple ID and it gave me the same error. I tried restoring from a previous time machine backup to the last time she remember successfully sent a message using her Mac. She is running Little Snitch, but I tried disabling that as well, and she still can't login.

What's especially strange here, is her Apple ID is fully functional on her iPad Pro and iPhone 6S. She can send messages and everything is working fine there. It's just her 2015 Macbook Pro that is completely shutting us out of Apple ID. It won't even let me sign out. It just hangs and does nothing.

She is still running Sierra. I never updated her, because I'd have to migrate a lot of her Adobe CC apps and actions and plugins. And a lot of that stuff breaks with new Apple OSs. It's the only thing I can think of that maybe it just needs a newer OS and something finally tripped it up.

The last thing I'm trying now is just doing a re-install of the OS to see if that works. Otherwise I'm absolutely stumped on this one. I read it could be some sort of spam block enabled server-side by Apple, but wouldn't that also lock her out on her iPad and iPhone?

Another side note, we don't have two-factor enabled on anything. I realize it provides extra security, but if anything happens to our phones, we don't want to be locked out of our Apple ID. Hence we never enable it, and Apple almost monthly logs us out of our Apple IDs and makes us unlock our accounts. I know it's an effort to push two-factor on us, but we really don't want it.

Any Ideas?

Posted on Apr 8, 2022 4:45 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Eric Root

Level 10

686,251 points

Apr 8, 2022 5:18 PM in response to Omek

Do you have access to another WiFi network where you can try?

See if anything here helps.

https://www.imyfone.com/ios-data-erase/9-tips-to-fix-there-was-an-error-connecting-to-the-apple-id-server/ -

https://appletoolbox.com/error-connecting-apple-id-verification-failed-how-to-fix/. -

https://macreports.com/verification-failed-there-was-an-error-connecting-to-the-apple-id-server-fix/. -

https://appuals.com/fix-verification-failed-there-was-an-error-connecting-to-apple-id-server/. -

https://errorcodespro.com/there-was-an-error-connecting-to-the-apple-id-server/. -

Verification Failed" There was an error connecting to the Apple ID server -

Reply

Answer 2

Omek Author

Level 1

20 points

Apr 8, 2022 6:51 PM in response to Eric Root

I don't currently have another Wi-Fi I can use. I tried connecting directly to our router from my ISP instead of our Airport, but that did nothing either.

I tried everything in those links.

I tried re-installing the OS, and it's still doing it. I was able to finally logout though by removing the files from the ~/Library/Application Support/iCloud/Accounts/ folder so that it is empty and rebooted. But now it says, "You can’t sign in at this time." I tried changing the password several times, but I get the same message. This is seeming more and more like a server-side issue with Apple.

However, I can sign in on the Mac via the AppleID website using Safari.

Reply

An unknown error occurred while signing into apple id

Similar questions