Apple users are being locked out of their Apple IDs with no explanation

There appears to be an increasingly widespread Apple ID outage of some sort impacting users tonight. A number of people on social media say that they were logged out of their Apple ID across multiple devices on Friday evening and forced to reset their password before logging back in…

Have you been signed out of your Apple ID?

We received our first tip about this around 8 p.m. ET. In the hours since then, the problem has gained significant traction on social media.

Apple’s System Status webpage doesn’t indicate that any of its services are having issues this evening. Still, it’s clear based on social media reports that something wonky is going on behind the scenes at Apple. A few of us here at 9to5Mac have also been directly affected by the problem.

People are being signed out of their Apple ID across all of their devices. If you try to sign in with your original Apple ID password, you’ll be locked out of your account. You’ll then be forced to reset your password before being able to sign back in. There doesn’t appear to be any rhyme or reason as to why this is happening.

Whether what’s happening on Friday evening has any relation to the ongoing password reset attacks problem that we’ve been tracking for several weeks is unclear right now.

Additionally, if you have Stolen Device Protection enabled, being signed out of an Apple ID randomly can present an especially big headache if you’re away from a trusted location.

Another problem: if you reset your Apple ID password, any app-specific passwords you had previously set up via iCloud will be reset as well.

I’ve asked Apple for more information and will update if I hear anything back. Have you been signed out of your Apple ID on your devices tonight? Let us know down in the comments.