Their first party account is an interesting read and available on their blog here:
https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/

The post was updated yesterday with the following:

Update 14 December 2025: Someone from Executive Relations at Apple says they’re looking into it. I hope this is true. They say they’ll call me back tomorrow, on 15 December 2025. In the mean time, it’s been covered by Daring Fireball, Apple Insider, Michael Tsai, and others, thanks folks! I’ve received 100s of emails of support, and will reply to you all in time, thank you. Finger’s crossed Apple calls back.

Friendly advice: never put your entire life in the hands of a corporation!

Also, the migration from local storage to the "cloud" was never a good thing for us, and the small gain in convenience wasn't worth it, but most people don't seem to realize that.

How many cases like this aren't making the news? There are probably thousands of people who depend on Apple or Google or Dropbox and are suddenly locked out with no options.

If it's not in your hands in an open format it's not yours.

Not an "apple fan", an apple-focuse software dev deeply embedded in their dev community.

Which I suppose goes a long way to explain them being multiple terabytes in the hole inside Apple's ecosystem, and also why even having a separate backup would definitely not fix their problem in the first place.

I’ve been an Apple customer for 35 years. Had an Apple account as long as Apple has had such things. A few years ago (specifically, when Apple started retiring 32-bit apps from the App Store) I saw where Apple was going and created a dedicated account for my Apple ID that’s separate from the one I use for my contact for Apple services.

If Apple locked me out of my account today, I’d lose access to 14 years of app purchases on that account. That’s about it? And at some point I started using an alternative ID for some of my purchases, so I’d only lose access to some of them. And of course, I now keep copies of everything backed up, since they could vanish from Apple’s servers at any time.

"I wouldn't like to be caught without a second backup." -- Miles Edward O'Brian, Chief of Operations, Deep Space Nine. ("The O'Brian Principle").

"" -- Every free software advocate who has been on about this during the entire past 20 years and up to twice that, warning us about these kind of things.

Either the user controls the...

or, OP article story.

Imagine having all your important data in just one place.

Part of me is glad the liabilities of trusting these companies with the history of your life are validated. If you don't control access, you don't own it.

SelfHosted community of Lemmy right now

If you do store your data, like me, in iCloud and Apple Photos then you should still take a backup.

The easiest way to do this to request a data export of all your Apple data. It’s then prepared into zip files you can download onto a local storage device.

I do it about once a year, which for me is a reasonable balance between risk and impact.

Here’s a guide: https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/get-a-copy-of-your-apple-account-data/

I’m not blaming the guy, but he seems smart enough that he should have known better. Data isn’t secure if it’s in a single location, he gave up control and the inevitable happened.

I do not trust anyone with my data, the more important, the more sure I am that I have copies in several locations, including ones that are entirely in my control. My photos exist on multiple devices, cloud, my selfhosted immich server and my offline backup. Same with documents and other important data. My ripped movie collection is not backed up since I have the physical media.

Do not give up control, the systems are all setup to give you the illusion of security, but then this kind of thing happens. Maybe I’m extra paranoid since I’ve been the victim of identity theft but I’m comfortable with my level of paranoia.

Update- for the record, yes, Apple needs to make this right. I DO NOT blame the victim, my comment is here as advice, not to shit on the dude.

Everyone always learns the hard way, just the same as I did - one copy is usually as good as no copies at all.

For data you can't afford to lose, the 3-2-1 rule is king. Original, cold local, and remote.

I’m a little curious as to why they used a gift card and didn’t just pay with their own card. Seems a hassle to add the extra step.

Having all my data stored with proprietary services is so nice, I don't have to worry about anything.

/S

But that's actually how the average idiot think.

It would honestly suck if everything you have is tied to one account.

Definitely a good lesson to has alternatives and back ups.

/c/Selfhosted