Not only am I back to regularly getting my Apple Account "locked," there's now a new twist where the "unlock" flow returns HTTP 503 responses unless I space out my actions during the process, leaving several minutes between steps—but not too many minutes, or else the whole thing times out! I've been trying to unlock my account for ~30 minutes so far…
(My session timed out again. I'm not sure if I'll ever be able to unlock it. This is my developer Apple Account, BTW.)
I did it! I had to tether my Mac to my phone to do it, which points to some kind of FiOS issue. (My phone is also Verizon.)
@siracusa FWIW — and I _totally_ understand this sounds bananas — I _swear_ that when I try to upload to iTunes Match or App Store Connect, it often fails.
When I egress onto the internet from my parents’, on a different ISP, it’s fine.
@siracusa The craziest networking problems I've seen have come from FIOS, like being able to get to some network addresses but not others at work's public facing IP block. I checked reputations on the IPs, source and destination, and all kinds of other debugging. Never did figure it out. Had to use phone or any of a bunch of VPNs to make it work. When we swapped to xfinity (because of cost, not this) it all started working right away. It definitely wasn't anything in my home net.
@siracusa on my side stuff like that happens because I'm running pihole and sometimes some service switched something to a domain that ended up on one of the subscribed block lists...
@wonshu I’m not running anything like that, but if I were, it would fail consistently, not sporadically, and waiting between requests would not avoid the problem.
@siracusa Time to subscribe to Apple One +, now with higher rate limits!
This is the error that appears on the web page when some part of the execution of a step gets a 503 response.
@siracusa My bet: Apple is subject to crippling levels of traffic from people trying to break its authentication.
@siracusa it’s one of those Cloudflare “prove you are a human” dialogs. But with no way to prove you are a human
@siracusa I’m not a programmer but that does not appear to be a helpful error message at all. 🤔
