Hello,

I decided to get my own Apple TV+ account and a few hours ago created it and wanted to delete it a few minutes later since I selected the wrong region. However I'm unable to delete it since the login to the support or account subdomains (the ones mentioned in their deletion guidelines) are not allowing me to sign in.

Does anyone know alternative options to the ones I've tried on how to delete an apple account?

Approach 1:

When I follow the link on this article: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102559

Sign in to your Apple Account on Apple's Data and Privacy page(https://privacy.apple.com/) on a Mac, Windows PC, iPhone, iPad, or Apple Vision Pro, and select “Request to delete your account”.

After inputting my email credentials and verification code from my email it asks me to add a phone number for MFA and doesn't allow me to progress to the next page(continue button is disabled) unless I input it. The only other option is to click "Cancel" button, which if clicked cancels the authentication process and I'm shown the previous email credential input screen.

After failure to login with just the email credentials I provided when registering I tried adding my phone number, verified it and then I saw a new screen showing this privacy policy:

Apple Account & Privacy

Apple Account is designed to protect your information and enable you to choose what to share. We work hard to protect your privacy and collect only the data we need to make your experience better. See how your data is managed(https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/apple-id/)

When you sign in on this website, Apple records certain usage data for security, support and reporting purposes, such as your IP address, time, security level and sign in history.

and a single button "Continue" below.

The link in the text is just their general privacy policy details. Clicking "Continue" doesn't do anything in the GUI, but in devtools I can see a failed POST HTTP request to https://appleid.apple.com/account/manage/repair with response code 500 (internal server error)

In the response there's a ~5000 line JSON returned, which contains mostly details about authentication types (phone number, email, etc.) and an error at the end:

"serviceErrors" : [ { "code" : "-21607", "message" : "An unknown error has occurred.", "suppressDismissal" : false } ]

Google doesn't show anything searching by the error code: "-21607".

Approach 2:

Going to Apple's main site then settings and then manage account I see the same login screen the same behavior as in Approach 1.

So there is no way to login without providing phone number MFA even though I didn't need it for creating my account and logging in to Apple TV+ but even providing the phone number and verifying it does not allow me to login.

If anyone could help that would be great.

EDIT:

After inspecting the failed HTTP request's body for possible clues to what the error code in the response might mean I found this:

repairType: "restricted_account_conversion"

Which in google led me to the following reddit comment:

https://www.reddit.com/r/applehelp/comments/17zawel/continue_button_not_working_on_apple_id_privacy/l74p1zh/

So I opened the console and noticed a request going to apples servers on appleid.apple.com/account/manage/repair. The request contained repairType:"restricted_account_conversion" and the response contained "An unknown error has occurred" - an internal 500 server error. After talking with an apple support senior advisor they connected to my machine and I was able to demo the issue along with console logs. He took screenshots of the console log errors and requested that I send him a video recording of the issue from start to finish to give to engineers.

After talking with the advisor our best guess is we are all [users on this post] seeing this issue because apple is using iPhones for MFA and because us non-apple users have to use SMS for mfa that part of the application was not well developed (it only affects a small portion of the users, so not a lot of eyes on it [my words not apples]).

Joel (the senior advisor I talked to) is gonna open a ticket with the engineering teams to help address this particular issue and I expect to hear back by Friday (although, given my experience with software engineering I expect an actual fix to take a bit longer).

But I was able to get the engineers clear reproduction steps for the bug including recordings, console logs and timestamps and was able to actually hand this off to an engineer - something they were lacking to reproduce the issue... sooooo here's hoping that they are able to track this down and fix it. I know that bugs like this are elusive and it might take a while to fix.. but I think there is hope now.

Something that might be a bit different in my case than others... I am actually able to login to apple tv and apple music (and view content) but I am not able to manage my account, add payment information or use the API to transfer music (using services like tunemymusic - this triggered the whole process for me because I am looking to ditch spotify).

I will update y'all on Friday if I hear back... If I don't update... I haven't heard back.

Seems like this an issue for at least 7 months ago and it affects any account that uses a non Apple device (i.e. iPhone) for phone number MFA.

So I'll contact Apple support as the commenter did, but these are some unethical business practices by Apple they should've had it fixed quite some time ago.