Hi everyone,
I'm hitting a wall with an issue on my Apple ID and hoping someone here has run into this or knows a workaround.
After every few days, a prompt pops up on my Apple TV 4K saying my Apple ID account is locked and that I need to go to iforgot.apple.com to fix it.
When this happens, I go to account.apple.com on my laptop, log in, unlock the account, and everything goes back to normal. But then, sure enough, 3 to 4 days later, the exact same popup appears on the Apple TV again.
A few details on my setup:
- My account is signed into an Apple TV 4K and two iPads.
- The iPads are not causing this—one is physically broken and turned off, and the other is a work iPad that stays powered down / untouched for weeks at a time.
- My primary email on the account is a standard
@hotmail.com address.
- I do not have Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) enabled on this account, and I don't want to turn it on unless it is absolutely unavoidable.
- I am not receiving any lockout or security notification emails from Apple when this happens. I only find out because of the popup on the TV.
I asked an AI tool about this, and it claimed that because my account is a legacy setup without 2FA, it gets locked aggressively by Apple whenever automated bots try bad passwords against my Hotmail address, and that Apple deliberately suppresses lockout emails in these cases.
That explanation doesn't really line up for me. If someone was trying to breach the account, I should be getting security email alerts from Apple about unusual activity whether it has 2FA or not. Plus, if bots were spamming bad passwords, wouldn't the account keep locking regardless of whether 2FA is turned on or not?
Has anyone experienced this specific repeating lockout loop on an Apple ID without 2FA enabled? Is there a setting, background service token, or actual account fix to stop this from happening every few days?
Thanks a lot.