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Apple card disabled my iCloud, App Store, and Apple ID accounts (2021)
- xyst 1y agoThis is nothing new from Apple. They do the same thing with vague ToS violations. Have moved or purchased alternates to digital assets. Nothing is held behind the Apple/Google/MS wall.
- jjtheblunt 1y agotldr : confused, the user decided to go read overlooked emails, and ... > As it turns out, my bank account number changed in January, causing Apple Card autopay to fail. Then the Apple Store made a charge on the card. Less than fifteen days after that, my App Store, iCloud, Apple Music, and Apple ID accounts had all been disabled by Apple Card.
- homefree 1y agoA non-story about them failing to pay a bill, then writing a blog post complaining about it. There are few bills you can just ignore without consequence.
- ebiester 1y agoHowever, if I miss a bill at my credit card because of some missed email, I can call them and get it fixed up. If I miss a bill at my bank, I can call my bank and we will get it fixed up. And those are a bit too big for my comfort compared to a credit union. The problem is if something goes wrong with amazon, google or apple, you can get locked into a giant hole.
- jjtheblunt 1y agothe author says the phone / imessage kept working fine, just unpaid cloud services froze. sounds like the apple support person never thought to ask or check if they had unpaid bills for those frozen services. (facepalm)
- accrual 1y ago> sounds like the apple support person never thought to ask or check if they had unpaid bills for those frozen services. Yeah, that was a little surprising to me too. One would imagine that ones iCloud or Apple account would have everything in one place on Apple's side. The support person should have been able to pull up the account and see some reference number related to the incomplete trade-in, the bounced payment, and some status message about the account being auto-locked due to missing payment. If the support person saw a normal, unaffected account - that makes me think visibility into the account is restricted into support tiers and the person should had the ability to escalate or request (logged) access to more details. It's a shame it took the author multiple days and calls into different departments to find resolution for what should have been a very obvious payment problem.
- qcic 1y agoI don’t see how that happened in this case. They were able to talk to someone and get it fixed.
- kennywinker 1y agoThe blog post was written NINE days after their first contact with apple support. "They were able to talk to someone and get it fixed" yes, after at least nine days of being locked out. This was all triggered by being 15 days late on a payment, because APPLE screwed up and didn't send a trade-in kit. If you're ok with being treated that way, that's fine - I'm not.
- homefree 1y agoBased on this post, I doubt Apple failed to send a trade in kit.
- kennywinker 1y agoWhy would you accuse them of lying? If the author wanted to lie why would they include their mistakes like missing the email? Either way, it doesn't actually matter - even if it's 100% the author's fault, NINE days to get to a human who can resolve the issue is enough of a reason to avoid having too many of your services centralized with apple.
- homefree 1y agoDoesn't have to be lying - just dumb errors. They probably got the box and didn't know what it was and threw it out by accident. It's easy enough to do. Given the entire post is them making dumb errors and then blaming others it would be in line with the rest of it.
- jjtheblunt 1y agoTrade in kits have in the past come from a third party; that’s unrelated to the person having a bank account number on file for recurring charges that’s invalid, and having not seen the email traffic explaining such.
- Aurornis 1y agoBut they did call, talk to someone, and get it fixed. The hitch was that the first person they called was unfamiliar with the issue and had to escalate it.
- kstrauser 1y agoYeah, it could’ve been subtitled “Apple finds this one weird trick to get debtors to pay their bills”.
- josephcsible 1y agoIf you fail to pay a company for a new thing, their self-help recourse should be limited to taking back/disabling the new thing, not all of the old things that you've previously bought from them and paid for. If they want more than that, they should have to go through the courts like any other kind of debt collection would.
- jjtheblunt 1y agoHow does that apply here?
- josephcsible 1y agoHe bought a new iPhone, and payment didn't go through. As a result, Apple did a lot more than just disabling the new iPhone.
- abc_lisper 1y agoArticle from 2021
- p0012042024uy 1y agoFrom 2021 previously discussed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26310817 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26310817
- DuckConference 1y agoAnd the response from apple linked in that thread: https://9to5mac.com/2021/03/03/apple-card-apple-id-unrelated/ https://9to5mac.com/2021/03/03/apple-card-apple-id-unrelated... Allegedly unrelated to the apple card, your appleid just gets locked if you don't fulfill a trade-in.
- dang 1y agoThanks! Macroexpanded: Apple Card Disabled My iCloud, App Store, and Apple ID Accounts - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26310817 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26310817 - March 2021 (302 comments)
- GuestFAUniverse 1y agoThat's why an all inclusive account like the X envisioned by EM is a pretty stupid choice, if you're a customer. Never go all-in, if you cannot win.
- jsheard 1y agoIt's also why you should never use your Google/Apple/Microsoft/whatever account to log into third-party services when the option is given.
- SoftTalker 1y agoImportant ones anyway. I'll use "Log in with Google" if it's sort of a one-off that I don't want to bother setting up an acocunt for and treat it as a throwaway.
- numpad0 1y agoIs that implying Musk got distracted away from SDC and waving around his proverbial reverse pointing gun on Twitter property again?
- morning-coffee 1y agoOr simply read your emails from them if you do.
- jillyboel3 1y agoHave you never been on a 3 week vacation? Or even just a 2 week one with a day before/after where you didn't sit down to read your email? Apple apparently started their freakout after 15 days
- icebergonfire 1y ago> simply read your emails from them if you do Certainly. Except their mistake had beyond-reasonable consequences, since account termination would result them losing access to: their phone, their laptops, their TV smart pucks, their tablets, their smart speakers, their photos, any accounts on websites if they logged in using Sign in with Apple, any accounts on websites if they were using Hide My Mail... Once you are in Apple jail, it's on Apple to have a good process to follow to try to go back to good standing. OP was met with a black box that may or may not read their internal Apple mail. They may or may not reply either. The moral to draw from this blogpost is to be careful of putting too many eggs on the same corporate basket. Though in theory you are good as long as you pay your bills, there is no banhammer with an accuracy stat of 100%! I've been on the receiving end of a false-positive fraud flag on my Amazon account (literally undeserved), it ended with my account being terminated and me being banned from the store. The blast radius was bigger than expected: - It forced a factory reset on all my Amazon Echos at 03:00AM (fun to be woken up to a house-wide symphony of smart speakers OOBE-ing at the same time). - It immediately negated my ability to exercise warranty consumer rights on most of my tech devices, as they were purchased on Amazon. - It also blocked from cancelling my Amazon recurring subscriptions, so I spent two more weeks receiving things like soap and cat food despite the account termination supposedly cancelling all outstanding orders. Support was unresponsive the whole time. - It immediately terminated my (luckily personal!) AWS resources, as these are also umbrella'd under the same account. No amount of email reading could have saved me since I did nothing wrong (still have all the receipts, but I'm a stranger on the Internet so caveat emptor). All I ever got back from the different tiers of customer support were different ways of saying you are bad and we don't need to listen nor explain, we are done bye bye.
- elzbardico 1y agoThis was from 2021 and in the end he was at least able to talk to some humans and solve the issue. As bad as it was, it was still miles ahead of what you could expect in a similar situation with google.
- ipv6ipv4 1y agoApple support is amazingly good. It’s stark when most other companies have “optimized” customer service to discourage users from using or achieving anything through it. It’s also often an interesting glimpse into Apple’s behind the scenes tech support tools which are quite extensive.
- vachina 1y agoYes. Even outside of US. Had a pending unauthorized Apple Store purchase on my CC, it was a 5 minute wait before I could reach a person on Apple Support app and get clarification.
- elzbardico 1y agoYes, even in what are called developing countries.
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- r0fl 1y agoThe fact that you can’t talk to a human about being locked out of Gmail which is used for millions of people’s entire lives is absolutely mind blowing
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- benoau 1y agoThe fact that in 2025 there is still no "rights" or "due process" for users is astonishing, you can be banned by automated systems, refused any reason, refused any actual recourse, and it's just forever. Thoroughly inadequate for platforms that have become entrenched in modern life.
- edwinjm 1y agoGetting a trade-in credit and then “forgetting about it”. What do you think would happen?
- runjake 1y agoI did this (there was a lot going on in life) and they just added the balance to my 0% interest loan. I was able to talk to an Apple rep and get a kit sent out and get the credit re-added. This was in 2024. Pretty easy.
- accrual 1y agoIndeed, that and missing a pretty serious sounding email from Apple. I 100% commiserate with the author and have missed important stuff before, but yeah, this article reminds me of the importance of making a habit to read the emails from my "important" accounts each morning. I setup some guardrails to help save myself from my own humanity, e.g. monthly "pay CC" calendar events.
- Zak 1y agoI'd expect a charge to my credit card, or a bill. If I didn't pay the bill, I'd expect another bill and a late fee. Eventually, I'd expect the debt to be transferred to a collection agency which would harass me about it for years and report my nonpayment to credit bureaus. If it was a large enough debt and I ignored all of that for long enough, I might expect to get sued. I would not expect to get locked out of my cloud storage, app store, email, etc....
- SoftTalker 1y agoTry not paying the rent on a storage unit. After a month or so, you'll find a new lock on the door. Go long enough without settling up (read the lease), and they will sell off the contents.
- Zak 1y agoSure, and skipping too many car payments gets your car repossessed, skipping too many mortgage payments leads to foreclosure, etc.... Those are serious consequences, but they're localized to the specific thing or service at issue. You don't lose access to your car because you fail to pay rent on your storage unit. Your house doesn't get foreclosed because your car gets repossessed.
- jms703 1y agoWhy was this 4 year old article posted with no additional context? Lots of red flags here on the author's part. This seems like a case of someone not following through on their tradein, missing a payment due to a changed bank account, and then ignoring Apple’s emails about the issue. The author makes it sound like Apple acted out of nowhere, but the reality is they gave notice and took action only after the author failed to respond. If you don’t return a trade-in and your card goes past due, it makes sense that Apple would revoke access to services tied to that purchase. Framing it as Apple “holding accounts hostage” feels misleading—it looks more like the natural result of missed obligations and poor follow-up.
- notpushkin 1y agoThey never recieved the trade-in kit. When asked, Apple never replied. And no, it doesn’t make sense for Apple to disable most of the services in case a credit card is past due for a few days.
- bastawhiz 1y agoI'm not sure I believe they never replied. The author missed an email saying their payment wasn't accepted and that all of their services would be disabled, that's pretty serious. I'm supposed to believe Apple just lost the ticket? I'm also not sure why the author didn't follow up: not following up has the direct consequence of being charged a substantial amount of money.
- notpushkin 1y agoYeah, I mean, I understand them being charged for the failed trade-in. Their credit card was charged, so Apple supposedly got the money (from Goldman Sachs). Why did they still block his account (owned by Apple) when he failed to pay his credit card bill (owed to Goldman Sachs)?
- bastawhiz 1y agoHe didn't pay for the device. The linkage between the card and the account doesn't actually seem important here. They locked the account that the unpaid iPhone was set up with. Why would Apple continue to provide service to an account that was being used by a device that was effectively partially stolen from them?
- amelius 1y ago> It suggests that charges by Apple on Apple Card are different from other purchases, and this can have serious consequences. We really need a concept like separation of powers inside companies too, otherwise we end up with corporate dictatorships.
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- joshstrange 1y agoOn one hand, I want to reply "duh, you didn't pay your CC" but at the same time Apple is _horrible_ about messaging things like this. I had some random Apple charge not go through (IIRC it was my monthly iPhone Citizen One bill that was paid on my Apple Card but the Apple Card rejected the payment???). And it fouled up things in odd ways that were not clear at all from any UI I could access. In the end I had to keep clicking a "retry" payment in some obscure corner of Apple's account management with zero info on if it worked or not then wait a few days to see if I got another scary email from Apple. It ended up working out without my needing to call support so I don't know if they would have been helpful. I will say, my experiences with Apple support have been largely positive to amazing. Their business support (ABM) is so good I felt like I was getting away with a massive heist getting the amount of help I got as a single-person LLC. Almost instant answer of the phone, clear audio, easy to understand support person, incredibly knowledgeable (used all the right industry terms), and gave me the info I needed to go smack AT&T (read more about here [0]). 10/10 experience. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39154315 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39154315
- kstrauser 1y agoSide moral there: if you have access to a functional regulatory system, don’t be afraid to ask it for help when a large company is messing with you. In general, such agencies love nothing more than to get to be the one to swat the corp on the nose with a rolled up federal register.
- joshstrange 1y ago> Side moral there: if you have access to a functional regulatory system, don’t be afraid to ask it for help when a large company is messing with you True. I've used the FCC and CFPB in the past and while the UI to interface with them is somewhat clunky, it's functional and in all 3 cases I was satisfied (vindicated). In at least 1 of the cases the monetary value was low enough that it was absolutely in my best interests just to pay it and make it go away but it felt so good to have the CFPB slap down Spectrum and get them to drop the fee. It makes me sick to my stomach to think of what's going to happen to those agencies over the next few years.
- kaonwarb 1y agoStories like this have been sufficient to convince me to stay far away from Apple Card or any other financial instrument directly entangled with the tools of my daily life.
- Bud 1y ago[dead]
- Zak 1y agoIt has always seemed unwise to me to go all-in on ecosystems where multiple services that aren't inherently related are provided by the same company. If there's a problem ranging from a missed payment to a fraud-detection false positive, someone who does might lose access to multiple services. I don't want to log in with my Google account, pay with Apple, get phone service from Paypal, or use my bank's app store. It's much less hassle to deal with a problem affecting only one of those than losing them all at once.
- Gareth321 1y agoAgreed. Every time I sign up for services I imagine how I would fare if I lost access to everything from this company. It's why I ended up de-Googling my life. The horror stories of people losing access to their Gmail accounts led me to purchase my own domain and migrate all my accounts with that email across. That ended up being a multi-year project, but now if my host ever cuts off access to my emails, I can be back online within an hour.
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- ZeroConcerns 1y agoSo, yeah, the linked article is half a decade old by now and would best be flagged as "HN is not Apple customer service", but there is something worth salvaging here. Which is: sure, you're a tech company wanting to change the world. And, sure, this will ruffle some feathers and break a few eggs by design, but: the least you can do is stand up for your customers, right? So: if your actual customers want to urgently talk to you about, ehm, things, how do you enable this? And, how do you communicate the outcomes to the wider world? Bad examples abound. But how would you do better?
- wat10000 1y agoI’d have a phone number that customers can use to reach someone at my company who can help them, and put that phone number in places where customers can find it. Which is what most companies actually do, including Apple. Uncontactable companies like Google aren’t the norm. I understand and share the frustration that email and chat work poorly, but unfortunately that’s often how it is. If you need help, your best bet is usually to call. It doesn’t sound like this guy ever did that.
- blindriver 1y agoThere needs to be a better way to deal with trillion dollar companies that have the power to remove essential parts of your life based on bugs or incompetent processes. Companies like Apple. Microsoft, Google, Meta, et al. have the money to spend on better customer support, but they don't because they have a monopoly. They know they can do whatever they want and there's nothing we can do. But even worse, they have absolute and total control and then hide behind their lack of customer support. I think there should be a law that states that once you become large enough or important enough, you MUST reach a certain level of competent customer support or you will get fined the amount of money it will cost to pay for this competent customer support. The reason why they get around bad customer support is because they are large enough so that they can bully billions of people by threatening to cut off access. Talk to Youtubers that get mysteriously cut off with no customer support to talk to. This is all because of customer support. Smaller companies need to invest in customer support because of competition but not these larger companies because they don't have real competition, and something needs to change to force them to do it.
- cowboylowrez 1y agoI can understand the problem from the viewpoint of the big companies. How do you provide personalized support to such a huge customer base? The solution of course is to charge for it! Say for instance, I got kicked of of "ogle", but its critical to all my billing etc because of email. Its free email, there are going to be cases when you get locked out (happened to me before with another email provider, THEY got hacked so locked ME out haha, only sentimental things were lost thankfully). But what about a $100 recovery fee? Then the problem becomes "how do you prove its your account"? There's a wide variety of jurisdictions and id mechanisms, can "ogle" manage all that? I don't know, I'm not close to even talking about "faang" or whatever let alone work at one. So many transactions happen nowadays with these systems that are long strings of rube goldberg machines helped by "AI" that is actually not that intelligent. Is it financially possible to even run these megacorps without the ability to discard problem "customers"? Can you build customer support processes and staff at this sort of scale? Even setting up new billing for what was previously a free account seems sort of daunting. I guess I'm saying that I'm not so sure that these megacorps "have the money to spend on better customer support," except in the apple case, their customer base is so "unfree" and high margin that I don't understand why they would have a problem, even if repairing an account required a fee for some sort of id verification which seems to be the crucial thing here. They are obviously well positioned with their per customer costs and apple id stuff.
- brundolf 1y agoApple's online services have always been a shitshow for me. Tiny details are bad or broken in ways that would never be acceptable on other major online services (or Apple's non-services software!) I don't know what's rotten- it can't be a lack of expertise, it must be a separate department with a broken culture. But I don't rely on them for anything crucial
- rchaud 1y agoThe moral of this story is that "vertical integration" doesn't always mean what it says on the tin."Carpe Diem" for shareholders can translate to "Caveat emptor" for consumers.
- josephcsible 1y agoI don't get why anyone is defending Apple here. Suppose for the sake of argument that Apple did everything right at first, and the author just chose not to pay his credit card bill for no reason. > We’ve been unable to collect full payment for your new iPhone. As a result, we will block the device on the order from further access to the Apple iTunes and Mac App stores, and disable all accounts associated with the device purchased on the order. Apple is retroactively making everything you've ever bought from them, even things you've fully paid for and owned outright, be the collateral for whatever payment you're currently behind on. If this weren't "do it on a computer", it would be obviously ridiculous. Imagine that you bought a new sink from Lowe's, defaulted on your Lowe's credit card, and so they came to rip the deck off of your house since you built it with lumber that you bought from them (and paid for) a few years ago.