Dad accidentally locked out of iPhone for 47 years

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It probably happened to most of us — we’d forget the correct passcode on our Apple gadgets and get locked out temporarily from a device. The timeout effectively becomes longer if you continue to get the code wrong, with some experiencing almost an hour of the timeout after frequent tries.

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A dad from Washington DC, however, was locked out of his device not only for an hour, but for 25,536,442 minutes or roughly 47 years. But it wasn’t his fault.

According to a report, journalist Evan Osnos let his 3-year-old son play with his iPad and got it back with an unbelievable surprise — a gadget that’s been disabled for more than 25 million minutes.

To put what happened into perspective, Osnos’ son input the wrong passcode many times to get this penalty, and he’ll be 50 years old once the iPad is ready to use. Apple security works by increasing the time a user needs to wait for every incorrect passcode that was used.

Osnos tweeted a photo of his disabled gadget via Twitter, stating that he wished it was fake but that he needed advice on what he can do. According to the report, some people responded with incredulity.

“I would just wait it out,” one responder said, while another suggested that he should “Reboot your 3 y.o.”

This kind of phenomenon is actually quite common, with some parents sharing that the same thing happened to them many times. It is most likely the consequence of raising tech-savvy children or letting kids who are too young to understand the concept of a security key, play around with a device.

But should you get yourself in the same predicament, don’t fret. It’s actually easy to open the device again but with a little bit of sacrifice. First, however, is to ensure that all your data has been backed up. Otherwise, there’s a big chance that all files in your phone could get lost.

Next, connect the iPad or iPhone to your computer and then go to iTunes. During connection, force restart the gadget. By doing this, a pop-up is expected to appear that will ask if you’d like to Restore or Update your device. The best course is to Restore so iTunes can download software for your device.

As soon as you have access to the software, you can initiate set up and be able to use the device again. Of course, this is pretty much saying that the only solution is to restore the device to its factory settings so all data found in the iPad or iPhone will probably be wiped out.

It’s not sure whether Osnos followed the advice. But if he didn’t, then 47 years is quite a long time to wait.