iOS 7 iMessage won't activate

Make sure your iTunes is up to date. Mine wasn't and I restored 3 times before I figured it out and wasted a lot of time

I had this problem, my iTunes was not up to date and that is why my iMessage and Facetime was not activating with the update and saying the same thing.

Just got off the phone with Apple - apparently a known problem at the moment, their activation servers are being hammered. They said to just leave the activation waiting for the next couple of hours and hopefully it will work. Not holding my breath.

I, also, am with Telstra. I have done EVERYTHING I can (resets, restores, wipes, activating from new phone, from restored backup, etc) and nothing has worked. I reckon it's Telstra. Not uncommon for them to not be ready for mass software upgrades 🙂 Is anyone who is still having this problem in Australia with any other carriers? If we're definitely all Telstra, I'm on a big corporate account and will find the right people if I'm sure it's a Telstra issue. If Optus/Voda people are having it too then it's definitely Apple.

The only people I know that have the problem are with Telstra within Australia. My newly setup iPhone without being linked to any Apple ID is having the issue, so I'm pretty sure there's nothing I can do..

I have verizon in SC

I got activation to work here is what's happening.

I followed everyone post here in this discussion. I chatted with Apple Tech support. Nothing worked except, erasing the phone completely. Setting it up as a new phone and restoring from an icloud backup. The Mac backup didn't work for some reason but the icloud one had several backups. The one that was before ios7 works. Since I had already installed ios7 I then erased the phone but ios7 firmware is already installed. Then I chose a backup before the installation. It sets up the phone and activates iMessage and Facetime before it installs all the data and applications. This works. My phone is a 64GB iphone 5 and there are a lot of photos and apps and data so it has been hours to reinstall on my slow overseas connection.

I think this is the only way to get your phone number activated for imessage and facetime.

Good luck everyone.

Apple you screwed up on this one big time, what a pain.

I'm with a Telstra too....same issue!!!

Cool. I've e-mailed our mobile rep at Telstra, will see what response we get. A brand new iPhone 5S user here, set up from scratch today, is experiencing the same problem with Telstra as well.

After I changed the Date and Time from manual to automatic, all problems are solved.

Ok, So this is my Imessage story....So yesterday at about 5:30pm In southern California I updated my Iphone 4 to IOS7, after the update i noticed that Imessage and Facetime wernt activating. So i googled it around 7:00pm my time and found this thread, after doing what EVERYONE suggested, more then ONCE it has yet to work. I am running an unlocked iphone 4, Imessage never gave me an issue before. After around 8:00pm my time my girlfriend came over and I updated her Iphone 4 for Verizon for her and everything worked perfectly fine......So IDK what is going on with my phone, but this is my only way of messaging people with iphones (which is 98% of my contacts) so thats why I dont pay the bill. No need thanks to Imessage, but now its making me want to go to Simplemobile and renew my account......I really hope it gets fixed soon. i am being patient, and i know Apple is swamped, but c'mon...I also keep getting "an error occurred during activation" and "could not sign in, please check network connection". im signed into itunes, icloud though. and internet is working fine...reset network settings, restored to new iphone, restored from icloud, and still nothing....im kind of losing it lol.

Same here - iPhone 4S, Telstra - frustrating beyond belief!!

Same issue, we have 3 phones,, 2 activated and 1 we can't get to activate... H E L P. Daughter phone is one NOT activated,, you know what that means! !

Same boat.. iPhone 4S, Telstra..

Have tried EVERYTHING other than a full restore..

Have spoken to both Apple and Telstra, both are no help.

Just going to reside to waiting it out now and hoping it just magically does it sometime in the next 24 hours..

did apple say anything about it?

this worked for me! thanks so much for the tip.

went through all the fuss of reseting and restarting, backing up and restoring. geesh.