New account locked and unusable

So after a morning of pain setting up my daughters phone.


Tried to create an apple account, wouldn’t do it, kept failing. Had to call support who unblocked something and then we tried again. Finally worked, account set up.


Signed in, all good. Then not long after, it asked to sign in again… wouldn’t do it. Went round and round getting nowhere. Turns out the account is locked and won’t do anything. No idea why, called apple, they don’t know either apparently. Said to follow a link to request access etc, but it can take up to 24 hours. Why? Why does it take this long to unlock anyway, and for a new account, why is it even locking to start with… and why can’t apple tell me why. Fully expecting in 24 hours to have got nowhere at all with it, but I wait to be surprised

Posted on Dec 25, 2025 12:22 PM

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4 replies

Dec 25, 2025 1:46 PM in response to Katana-San

They never said it would take 24 hours, they said it could, depending on if they need more information. Strangely it has issues setting it up and they had to “whitelist” things there end. So not sure too many failed logins cause that issue as there hadn’t been any at that point, failed or unfailed. Once they “whitelisted” it initially it worked, but then locked out not long after… considering it was in my hand at the time, there was no login attempts really, not by us anyway… strange one really.


Havent started an activation lock request, was told that wasn’t needed on the phone. There was no lock request when we set it up, it was a blank phone, so any lock is to the email we used setting it up, which claims is locked.

Dec 26, 2025 4:46 AM in response to andrewparkes

Oh this gets better, another 2 hours on the phone with Apple… apparently they want me to make an activation lock request. Which itself is going to be fun.


The phone is locked to the account we had to get Apple help us create yesterday, the issues with the account locking they apparently have no idea why, I find that hard to believe too, just reeled off 6 “possible reasons” of which none make sense… do the not have specific logs on their systems that could determine this… apparently not.


So here we are, with a phone we started off with completely unlocked, activated to a new Apple account we created, and now useless because they won’t help and don’t seem to have a clue.


We bought the phone off a friend, apple want proof of purchase, the phone is 2 years old, we aren’t even sure if they still have it as it was bought on a contract, they are going to look and see if they can find it though.


But as far as I can see, this is an issue created by Apple and their locking of an account without reason or cause, and not with the phone itself… but hey ho let’s make everyone else jump through hoops.


happy Christmas from Apple… what fun



New account locked and unusable

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