A large department store sold someone an apple gift card that was likely stolen/already redeemed, apple responded by permanently closing his apple account, bricking his devices and causing him to lose access to 20 years of saved media in iCloud
Edit: in the FAQ section he says that he has backups so that’s good. Main damage is that all of his apple devices are tied to the deleted account and won’t work anymore
Scolding people who doesn’t do backups. Even hosting all locally if you don’t want to lose 20 years of files you do backups.
Based on the article, it looks like the issue is more that they’ve bricked tens of thousands of dollars worth of physical devices that he owns and that since he’s a professional developer for Apple, they’ve kneecapped his income. He has the data mostly backed up.
dont even need to host locally, pulling the files and storing them on hard drives/CD-ROMs to shove in your cupboard is something. Though I gotta get better at educating folks on that front without sounding like a maniac