These days, it’s hard to keep track of all the passwords you have with the ever-increasing number of digital accounts at your disposal. Hence, it’s not entirely uncommon for people to forget their Apple ID passwords and get locked out of iCloud. The iCloud account recovery procedure is simple and straightforward enough, but Apple warns users against doing a certain anxious action.
That action would be spamming the iCloud account recovery requests. For those of you who don’t speak millennial, spamming is the act of sending messages over and over again for various reasons. In this case, a lot of people might want to speed up the recovery process for their iCloud. According to Apple, that’s a sure way to cancel the whole process.
Apple reserves the right the cancel the process if the users fail to comply with the multi-step recovery. Apparently, this includes persistent intervention from users in the form of spamming requests. Should users send the first request, Apple will usually respond stating that the process might take several days or longer; this is for security reasons.
Apple has then explicitly and officially stated in a document that they can also abandon the process if the users keep attempting and failing to recover passwords in order to send multiple requests:
“If you submitted your account recovery request with iforgot.apple.com through your device’s browser, you should avoid using that device during this period. Using that device might cancel account recovery. If you did not already try before beginning account recovery, you might be able to recover your account by accessing another trusted device. If you did try, then accessing another device that is signed in with your Apple ID could cancel your account recovery. To avoid delays, turn off other devices until account recovery is complete,” as stated by the official support documentation.
In other words, if you’ve tried every possible password but still had to resort to sending a request, there’s nothing left to do but sit and wait.