The blog post was written NINE days after their first contact with apple support. "They were able to talk to someone and get it fixed" yes, after at least nine days of being locked out. This was all triggered by being 15 days late on a payment, because APPLE screwed up and didn't send a trade-in kit.

If you're ok with being treated that way, that's fine - I'm not.

> sounds like the apple support person never thought to ask or check if they had unpaid bills for those frozen services.

Yeah, that was a little surprising to me too. One would imagine that ones iCloud or Apple account would have everything in one place on Apple's side. The support person should have been able to pull up the account and see some reference number related to the incomplete trade-in, the bounced payment, and some status message about the account being auto-locked due to missing payment.

If the support person saw a normal, unaffected account - that makes me think visibility into the account is restricted into support tiers and the person should had the ability to escalate or request (logged) access to more details. It's a shame it took the author multiple days and calls into different departments to find resolution for what should have been a very obvious payment problem.