The ridiculous and maddening situation in which Paris Buttfield-Addison finds himself continues to rattle around my brain. The idea that any one of us could be locked out from our Apple devices because some presumably automated system flagged the wrong thing is alarming.
Greg Morris:
The scale of dependency is what makes this different from older tech problems. Losing your email account twenty years ago was bad. Losing your iCloud account now means losing your photos, your passwords, your ability to access anything else. We’ve built these single points of failure into our lives and handed them to corporations who can cut us off for reasons they won’t explain. That’s not a sustainable system.
Morris is correct, and there is an equally worrisome question looming in the distance: when does Apple permanently delete the user data it holds? Apple does not say how long it retains data after an account is closed but, for comparison, Google says it takes about two months. Not only can one of these corporations independently decide to close an account, there is no way to know if it can be restored, and there is little help for users.
Adam Engst, TidBits:
I’d like to see Apple appoint an independent ombudsperson to advocate for customers. That’s a fantasy, of course, because it would require Apple to admit that its systems, engineers, and support techs sometimes produce grave injustices. But Apple is no worse in this regard than Google, Meta, Amazon, and numerous other tech companies — they all rely on automated fraud-detection systems that can mistakenly lock innocent users out of critical accounts, with little recourse.
This is a very good idea. Better consumer protection laws would obviously help, too, but Apple could do this tomorrow.
There is one way the Apple community could exert some leverage over Apple. Since innocently redeeming a compromised Apple Gift Card can have serious negative consequences, we should all avoid buying Apple Gift Cards and spread the word as widely as possible that they could essentially be malware. Sure, most Apple Gift Cards are probably safe, but do you really want to be the person who gives a close friend or beloved grandchild a compromised card that locks their Apple Account? And if someone gives you one, would you risk redeeming it? It’s digital Russian roulette.
I cannot tell you what to do, but I would not buy an Apple gift card for someone else, and I would not redeem one myself, until Apple clearly explains what happened here and what it will do to prevent something similar happening in the future. And, without implying anything untoward, it should restore Buttfield-Addison’s account unless there is a compelling reason why it should not.
When I bought my iMac through Apple’s refurbished store in 2019, the only credit card I had was one where I kept a deliberately low limit. The iMac was over $3,700. To get around my limit, I bought a $2,000 gift card and paid it off immediately, then put the remaining $1,700 and change on my credit card.
I did not think twice about the potential consequences if this had tripped some kind of fraud detection system. I cannot imagine doing something similar today given everything Buttfield-Addison has gone through.
Update: Buttfield-Addison:
Update 18 December 2025: We’re back! A lovely man from Singapore, working for Apple Executive Relations, who has been calling me every so often for a couple of days, has let me know it’s all fixed. It looks like the gift card I tried to redeem, which did not work for me, and did not credit my account, was already redeemed in some way (sounds like classic gift card tampering), and my account was caught by that. […]
This is good news. It also answers my trying-not-to-be-clickbait headline question: yes, a gift card can, in some circumstances and possibly without your foreknowledge, compromise your account. That is not okay. Also not okay is that we are unlikely to see a sufficient explanation of this problem. You are just supposed to trust that it will all be okay. I am not sure I can.