The iOS 10 beta was released to the public last week, providing a sneak peek at Apple’s upcoming software to millions of people. Unfortunately, it’s also been providing a sneak peek at how iOS 10 can randomly lock your Apple ID, making all your expensive iDevices instantly useless.
And no, Apple Support doesn’t really know what’s going on.
DON’T MISS: How to install the iOS 10 public beta on your iPhone or iPad
A Reddittor first brought the issue to light, claiming that several users have seen the same glitch. First, they see a message on all of their Apple devices, requesting that the user re-enter their Apple ID password. Apparently, that’s due to a bug with app-specific passwords, which affects all versions of iOS. It shouldn’t be a big deal — you just have to re-enter or reset your password.
The problem comes withe iOS 10 beta. Apparently, Apple’s iForgot password reset feature is completely broken for beta users who have two-factor authentication turned on. That means anyone who needs to reset their password, either because they forgot, or because iOS locked them out, can’t do so:
At approximately 9:50 AM EDT, all of my signed in Apple devices requested that I enter the password in Settings (or System Preferences, respectively). I was told upon entering my password that my account had been locked out due to security reasons. Upon visiting the iForgot (Apple’s password reset site) page and entering my email, I was greeted with a message saying “Server error” and “Your request could not be completed at this time.” Dumbfounded and unable to find any traces of this error on Google or Reddit, I called them up wondering what could be causing it (beta, outage, compromised). I was helped by a nice lady who informed me that there were no outages and that she hadn’t received any information about this bug. I then spoke to her supervisor who told me that there was nothing he could do, and because I had two-factor authentication enabled he could not put my account in “troubleshooting mode” for the engineers. Right now, my case has been forwarded to the iTunes engineers and I will be getting called back sometime in the next week. He told me that the problem may be an outage on a server used for beta software or a programming mistake (which seems most likely) and it could resolve itself.
We’ve reached out to Apple, but the company has yet to confirm the bug or provide a fix. Some Reddit users appear to be finding workarounds, such as getting Apple Support to send a link to return to previous security settings.
