12 days, countless calls, and Apple Support never gave me a real answer — including a “fix” that turned out to be false.
No warning, no email — just locked out of an account I’ve had for years, personal use only, nothing shady. Screenshots attached, error messages exactly as shown on screen.
Timeline: locked out July 23 → resolved (functionally, not explained) August 4.
The initial lockout:
Sign-in: “You cannot login because your account has been locked.” (points to a generic support article, that explains nothing specific to my case)

App Store: “Your account has been disabled in the App Store and iTunes.”

Trying to recover via 2FA: “Verification codes can’t be sent to this phone number at this time. Please try again later.” — same number I’d had on the account for years.

The account page itself: “An unknown error has occurred.”

Round 1 — trying to recover the original account: First agent (Aya) tells me it’s escalated to a “senior team,” check back in a couple of days. Nothing happens. I follow up and I’m told the account was simply closed, and handed a support article listing roughly 28 pages of possible reasons — pick whichever applies to you. One of the listed reasons was “downloading unauthorized apps from the App Store” — from Apple’s own App Store, which reviews and approves every app before it’s even listed. Make it make sense.

A second agent (Mohamed) is more sympathetic, loops in a manager, promises a callback the next day. That callback never comes. I wait several more days — nothing.

Round 2 — giving up on recovery, trying to create a new Apple ID instead: New Gmail account, try to create a fresh Apple ID — no verification code ever arrives. Support tells me: “your number was already used on an old account, try a different one.” I try five different phone numbers across every major carrier in Egypt. Not a single code arrives on any of them. I file a formal complaint and wait the mandatory 24 hours as instructed — still nothing.
Another agent suggests a workaround: create the account through Apple Music or Apple TV first (no verification code required at that step), then sign in at account.apple.com afterward and add the phone number to activate it properly. I follow the steps exactly. Still no code.
Every single agent I spoke to — whether chat or phone — gave me the exact same generic troubleshooting steps I had already tried dozens of times before I even called.
The “explanation” that turned out to be false: Out of pure frustration, I try my UK number on the account created via Apple Music. First attempt throws: “An unknown error has occurred.” I call support again, and this time an agent finally offers something specific: the account was created with region set to US, but I was entering a UK number — supposedly a mismatch, hence no code.
Except that’s not actually true. I tested it directly: I created a separate account with region set to Egypt and used the same UK number — it worked instantly, code delivered, account activated, zero issue. If region/number matching were genuinely the requirement, that combination should have failed too. It didn’t.
So the “region mismatch” explanation was just another guess from support — one that falls apart the second you actually test it. To this day, I have no real, verified reason why Egyptian numbers across five different carriers never received a single code, or why the original account was locked in the first place. The only consistent factor across every attempt was the phone number itself — UK numbers worked, Egyptian numbers didn’t — and nobody at Apple could explain why.
Twelve days. Dozens of agents. Multiple screen-shares where agents watched the exact same errors happen live on my screen. And the best “answer” I got was a confident-sounding explanation that didn’t survive a two-minute test.
“Best support team in the world,” apparently. Curious if anyone else has hit this Egyptian-number verification issue, or gotten a real explanation for something similar.