Toddler Playing With Mom’s iPhone Accidentally Locks It For 47 Years

March 7, 2018

A mother from Shanghai, China, had the most shocking iPhone experience after her 2-year-old son accidentally locked it for nearly half a century while playing with the lock screen.

According to Chinese media outlet Kankanews via South China Morning Post, the woman, identified only by her surname Lu, gave the phone to her son back in January so he could watch educational videos on it.

The mother returned home to check on her phone only to find that the device had been disabled for 25 million minutes, which is equivalent to 47 years.

It turns out that the phone’s lock period is extended every time someone inputs an incorrect password, but it’s unclear how many times the child attempted to do so. In Lu’s case, her son kept pressing the screen when the phone asked him to enter the code.

A phone technician at an Apple Store in Shanghai gave Lu two options to fix this problem: wait it out or wipe out all of the data in her phone and do a factory reset.

Obviously, the first option is completely off the table.

“I couldn’t really wait for 47 years and tell my grandchild it was your father’s mistake,” Lu told the reporters.

Wei Chunlong, the technician from the Apple Store in Shanghai, said that her situation is not uncommon, and the lock duration on her device is not exactly the worst one they have seen.

He noted that there were cases where customers bring in phones that get locked for the equivalent of over 80 years.

“In this woman’s case, the only way out [without waiting] is to erase all the phone data and do a factory reset,” the technician said.

The story has sparked a debate on whether or not Lu’s child should be allowed to play with the phone alone, and the mother should have a back up of her phone data on a separate device so it could easily be retrieved.

Featured Image via Flickr/Micah Sittig (CC BY 2.0)

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