[brundolf]

Important detail:

> The only thing Apple Card was paying for was the 2TB iCloud upgrade — and when I try to change the payment method, it refuses and says “Your account has been disabled in the App Store and iTunes.”

It's not hard to imagine a payment issue for iCloud causing iCloud to be locked or otherwise limited, and given that Apple's online services tend to be buggy and unreliable it's not a huge stretch to think this could have some unintended consequences for adjacent things like the App Store. As someone else in the thread pointed out, surely others have missed Apple Card payments at this point, and we would've already heard about this if it were consistent and/or by design.

Of course even if it wasn't intentional, it's still another example of the single-point-of-failure problem we have when our entire lives depend on an account with a tech company that's way too big to care when users fall through the cracks.

[snemvalts]

You don't even need payment problems, someone can call into the support and have your account disabled.

My mom's Apple account was disabled with the same message, thought it was billing related as well. It turned out that someone with a similar surname had called in and requested their account to be disabled, but the call had cut out. The support rep happily connected the two dots and disabled my mom's account.

[ksec]

Are you suggesting it is a fraud detection? Which sounds like one if he was changing payment info. ( Like doing it with VPN )

[brundolf]

I'm suggesting it was something like "Your payment for iCloud didn't go through, so we locked iCloud, and whoops our system is a mess so I guess you can't use the App Store or iTunes either, maybe, although it's possible you're just getting a boilerplate error that isn't actually telling you the truth". This would be consistent with my past experiences with Apple's online services, and it's the reason I don't plan to spend money on any of them or rely on them for anything important. They're a dumpster-fire; the exact opposite of Apple's hardware and (for the most part) their system software.

Fraud detection is plausible too, though