Uh oh.
A toddler in Shanghai reportedly locked his mum’s iPhone for 25 million minutes (or the equivalent of 47 1/2 years) while he was playing with it.
According to the South China Morning Post, the mum said said she had given the two-year-old boy the phone so he could watch educational videos online.
But when she returned home one day she found that he had put the wrong password in so many times that the phone locked for 25 million minutes.
Of the incident, the mum said:
“I couldn’t really wait for 48 years and tell my grandchild it was your father’s mistake.”
There’s a security feature included on all iPhones that keeps you (or anyone who may have your phone) from trying out dozens of different passcode.
After the first four failed passcode, you’ll be blocked out from trying again for a minute if you get the passcode wrong again.
This goes up to five minutes if you fail six times, 15 minutes for the seventh and eighth wrong attempts, and then a whole hour for nine wrong attempts.
It’s not immediately clear if it’s even possible to lock an iPhone for 47 years – although there were a few threads in the Apple Support section of parents telling similar tales.
But if you find yourself in a similar spot after your little one has been playing with your phone, it’s not all bad news – provided you’ve got a backup of your iPhone.
All you would have to do to unlock your mobile phone is erase your phone’s data with a factory reset.
The mum’s tale of iPhone woe led to a huge debate in China, where many people said that she shouldn’t have left the device with her son unsupervised.
