Overnight, many people reported on social media that they were inexplicably logged out of their Apple IDs and then asked 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 connect to iCloud again, while others with Stolen Device Protection enabled said they had to wait an hour before they could log in.
Apple's System Status web page doesn't show current issues with any of its services, so it's unclear if this is a widespread issue. Said that, 9to5Mac reports that even some of its employees were also affected by the problem. At least one Forbes taxpayer apparently you 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 Apple's support team told them that “sometimes random security improvements are added to your account,” while on Reddit, a person posted today in a thread on the topic that Apple support told them that their password “was changed around midnight.”
Some people said they also had to reset their app-specific passwords for third-party applications that access your Apple ID (email clients, for example).
Not everyone was forced to change their passwords, however, as the person who posted in the previous Threads post said that resetting the password was only “suggested,” not required.
mac developer Michael Tsai wrote a blog post on how to approach the topic. In “another case where my Apple ID was mysteriously locked,” he said he had to wait an hour to reset it because of Stolen Device Protection, Apple's new security feature to keep owners' iCloud accounts protected. iPhone in case your phone is stolen. Evidently, the feature only listed a grocery store that Tsai visits every two weeks as one of the non-configurable locations where the one-hour password reset delay would not apply.
Apple did not immediately respond to The edgeRequest for comments. In the meantime, as frustrating as the issue may seem, at least not everyone had to deal with it on hard mode:
