Many people say their Apple IDs were inexplicably reset last night

Overnight, many people reported on social media that they were inexplicably logged out of their Apple IDs and then forced to reset their passwords when they tried to log in again, and no one seems to know why. Some reported needing to enter their iPhone passcode to sign into iCloud again, while others with Stolen Device Protection turned on said they had to wait an hour before being able to log in.

Apple’s system status page doesn’t show current issues with any of its services, so it’s unclear whether this was a widespread issue. Said that, 9to5Mac reports that even some of their employees were also affected by the problem. At least one Forbes taxpayer apparently also experienced the problem. The outlet saw no indication that this was related to the password reset attacks that several publications, Including Forbes, covered in March.

One Mastodon user said a member of the Apple support team told them that “sometimes random security improvements are added to your account,” while on Reddit, one person posted today in a thread on the subject that Apple support told them their password “was changed around midnight.”

Some people said they also had to reset their application-specific passwords for third-party applications that access your Apple ID (email clients, for example).

However, not everyone was forced to change their passwords, as the poster in the Threads post above said the password reset was only “suggested,” not mandatory.

Mac Developer Michael Tsai wrote a blog post on how to deal with the matter. In “another case where my Apple ID was mysteriously locked,” he said he had to wait an hour to reset because of Stolen Device Protection, Apple’s new security feature for keeping iPhone owners’ iCloud accounts protected on in case your phones are stolen. Evidently, the feature only listed a supermarket that Tsai visits every two weeks as one of the non-configurable locations where the one-hour delay for password resets would not apply.

Apple did not immediately respond to On the edgerequest for comment. Meanwhile, as frustrating as the problem may seem, at least not everyone has had to deal with it the hard way: