We all know what happens when parents leave electronic devices unattended and their kids get their hands on them. It’s one of the reasons we can appreciate the necessity of passcode protections, that, and the possibility of strangers charging porn to our iTunes account.
But sometimes that protection carries costs of its own. One Shanghai woman is finding this out the hard way after her 2-year-old son unwittingly locked her out of her phone for the next 47.78 years (or precisely 25,114,984 minutes).
How? According to a news report from Taiwan-based broadcaster CTV, the toddler had repeatedly entered the wrong passcode into her iPhone, causing it to incrementally up the lockout time on each attempt. Sadly, we don’t know precisely how many times the tike punched in an incorrect code.
Speaking to the news outlet, the woman, surnamed Lu, said she doesn’t want to reboot her phone as that would mean losing all the files, photos, and phone numbers she has stored in her cell phone.
Unfortunately, waiting nearly five decades probably isn’t a realistic option either.
“I can’t wait for more than 40 years,” Lu said. “In 4o years I probably won’t be able to talk. Although I’ll probably joke to my grandchildren ‘this is your dad’s fault.'”
A little digging turned up this thread from 2016, in which we can see Lu is not the first person getting the dread 47-year lockout.
A technician explained to CTV that this happens when a passcode has been entered incorrectly too many times, and it is used to protect a users’ privacy and data.
He explained that the first time a passcode is entered incorrectly the phone will be disabled for one minute, then for five, and then half an hour. After that, the time the phone is disabled will be random, and the technician said that it is possible for an iPhone to be disabled for 80 years.
When asked what Lu can possibly do to access her phone, the technician responds: “There is no way to solve it unless she resets the system. All the files cannot be transferred either.”
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