A two-year old boy has locked his mother’s iPhone for 47 years after repeatedly entering the wrong passcode.
A mother in Shanghai left her son to watch ‘educational videos’ on her smartphone but returned to find it had been locked for 25 million minutes.
Apple’s iPhones can be set to lock out anyone trying to use them if a wrong passcode is entered with the lockout period increasing with each failed attempt, but it is not clear how many times the child typed in the wrong numbers.
Each time the wrong keys were pressed, the phone was disabled for a period of time, reported the South China Morning Post citing news website Kankanews.com.
A technician at an Apple store in Shanghai reportedly told Ms Lu to either wait for years to try to put her passcode again or wipe the contents of the handset clean and then reinstall files.
“In this woman’s case, the only way out (without waiting) is to erase all the phone data and do a factory reset,” technician Wei Chunlong was quoted as saying.
Chunlong also said that there had been cases of phones getting locked for an equivalent of over 80 years by the same method.
Ms Lu said she has waited for two months but has seen no sign of the problem rectifying itself.
“I couldn’t really wait for 47 years and tell my grandchild it was your father’s mistake,” Ms Lu was quoted as saying.
Apple has built-in such lockouts feature on all iPhones to prevent bad actors from hacking the devices with the help of software or machinery. The iOS device becomes “disabled” after six concurrent incorrect PIN attempts, but also has a feature to delete the phone’s data after 10 incorrect attempts.