IMessage won't activate my phone number

Hey all.

I turned off buth iMessage and Facetime, tried the two numbers quoted by tungddao, got a 'not connected' voicemessage both times, turned on both iMessage and Facetime, waited a couple of minutes and BANG, both activated after hours of frustration and effort, including a hard re-start.

Had to power cycle the phone to initiate iMessage, but all back in the blue.....

Thanks for the wierd solution tungddao. Got to say your the man.......(or woman, as the case may be)

i have solved this issue by restoring to ios 6.1.3 to my iphone 4s.

i tried every steps on this forum and google. then i found a way to activate imessage and facetime with following steps.

step 1: backup your device to itunes.

step 2: fresh restore your device with latest firmware.

step 3: while activating your device do not sign with your apple id-skip it.

step 4: let it activate your phone number first. start using iphone.

step 5: imessage and facetime will activate to your phone number.

step 6: restore you backup and you will see your phone number and apple id activated to imessage and facetime.

hope this will solve your problem.🙂

Well looks like many people have the same issue. This has happened to me before. Couple weeks ago. What I did was make sure my date & time was accurate but ever since yesterday.. My imessage wouldnt let me use my number on my iPhone. I really have tried everything & im getting really annoyed & dont know what to do. If anyone, please find a solution.

I was skeptical that calling the number tungddao listed would work.

However after hours of messing with my phone trying to get it to let me activate my phone number with no luck I went ahead and called the number. It made a strange noise after connecting, so I hung up. Went in to settings and my number was check marked and activated.

Thanks tungddao!!!

In recent day, apple imsg server has been acttacking by DDoS so your fone number could not be activated sometimes.

But anyway, you can try my solution above to reactivate it. I did it many times with many ip which have same problem

OK, you MUST have an active payment method connected with your appleID!

that's how I solved my issue with my iPhone 5.

it turned out that my credit card that I had connected with my acount had expired and I hadn't updated that information.

once I updated my new card information, all was fixed immediately.

STEPS:

1. go into itunes and sign in using your appleID

2. once signed in, it should link you directly to your "Account Information"

3. Look at "Payment Type" and edit your card information

4. go back to your iPhone and go to Settings > Messages > Send & Recieve

5. Both your email, and your phone number should now be listed and checked (EVEN IF YOUR PHONE NUMBER IS GREYED OUT, IT IS STILL CONNECTED)

6. send a text iMessage to someone who also has iMessage to confirm that they are recieving your messages from your phone number and not your email address.

DONE (:

have a great day! hope this works.

Ok so my imessage and FaceTime both show different numbers (neither number is my number) I'm from UK and one number is from Thailand and the other is from Australia. I've turned the imessage and FaceTime off and on, signed in and out of my apple ID. Reset the phone, removed and replaced the SIM card. Tried 101 solutions touted on the web but still same problem. When I click imessage to on and sign into my apple ID, it has my correct email and mobile number. However, when I click done and the view the send and receive addresses, the greyed out number is a Thailand number and no longer the mobile number that my apple ID had identified. I have also contacted my service provider and there is no problem on their end and I rang apple support and they said they didn't know what to do and that they hadn't heard of this issue before. Any profound suggestions?

Has anyone experienced this same problem with Movistar in Spain? I was with Vodafone here in Spain and had no problems and now I've switch to Movistar and my phone number (same one I had with Vodafone) is not being recognized by iMessage.

I've tried all the previous suggestions and have had no luck.

Any other suggestions?

thanks

Alex

It is a SIM card / carrier issue. My sim took 2 months for iMessage to start recognising it. The network people couldn't help me and neither could apple. I suggest getting your SIM swapped or else you will just have to make do. Good luck.

So at the end it was just a sim card issue?? you just waited two months and it settled on it's own?

I have exactly the same problem as you did, using one number(U.S) and having two different ones(HK and Thai)registered for iMessage and FaceTime.

Yes. So I went back to UK for a couple of weeks holiday and my UK sim has always synced with iMessage and FaceTime. However when I put my Australian sim back in then FaceTime and iMessage would then be stuck synced to my UK number. After having my UK sim in for 3 weeks I changed back to my Australian sim and it just started working properly.

I've been escalated to the highest order in apple engineering and no one had ever heard of it happening before. They had me send them screen shots etc. turns out it must just have been a SIM card glitch. Total farce really. Hope it works out for you. Sometimes there isn't a quick fix for these things unfortunately and getting a new sim might be the best option.

I was able to fix this issue after two days of "waiting for activation".

Here is my guess of what is causing the problem:

- Your phone tries tell iMessage server that it should activate your number.

- Based on where you live (region/country) your request gets picked up by different servers (UK vs US vs France for example).

- The server that picks up the request sends a text message to your phone to confirm that the number really belongs to you. Depending on which server has been assigned to you, you may be getting the text message from a different country code.

- Your iPhone monitors the text messages that come in. When the iMessage activation text message comes in your iPhone doesn't show you that message.

What we are trying to do with the fix below is to tell iMessage to use a different server to send your activation message.

Go to Settings > Messages

Tap on your apple id.

When prompted enter your apple id and password.

Change your location/region (I changed it from US to UK).

Go back and now everything should be working fine!

Don't forget to change your region back to US afterwards.

i am facing the same problem. the carrier am using is safaricom kenya and called them but they have no clue and confirmed they have not blocked any premium sms. this problem started recently it use to work fine. i have tested my phone with another carrier and worked immediately. Please assist. thanks

I tried all kind of solutions, but it didn't work.

I've made the time zone thing.

I tried to restore network settings.

I tried to restore and erase all content and set it as a new iphone.

I tried to change the DNS number.

I tried to reenter my phone number at the Apple ID webpage. I tried to erase it.

I tried to turning off the wifi conexion, And I have wait 24 hours to activate. Nothing seems to work.

I had a chat with apple support, they told me that is a software problem, that I have to call to apple's phone support, I can't do that 'cause I live in Chile, so there is no apple's phone support in my country. I thought that if is a software problem, I can downgrade the IOS to 7.0.3 or later, but I couldn't, my Iphone 5s didn't recognize that software.... i don't know why, I guess it's because we only can make an upgrade...

The thing is that before a bought this iphone 5s, i had a Iphone4s and facetime and imessage worked perfectly on it. I bought it with the same network carrier. When I changed the phone, I restored the 4s iphone as a new one, so I don't have an Apple ID working on different iphones.

I really don't know what to do. 😢 HELPPPPPPPPP