I need to create an Apple account since yesterday. At first I got the error message “Your account cannot be created at this time.” right away. So I waited until the Cloudflare outage was over.
After that, I could submit the request, received codes via email and text message. But when I enter the code from the text message, the error message “Your account cannot be created at this time.” appears again.
The service “Apple Account” is marked green on Apple’s status page. The email address and phone number are working, as they both received the codes.
Update
I described to an AI that the problem couldn’t be with my email address or phone number because I received the verification codes.
The AI agreed.
That’s why I ditched this email address and created a new one. Everything worked on the first try today. But I can’t tell you if changing the email address was the solution or waiting another day. Apple’s error messages are just not helpful.
Cloudflare, AWS, Google… who has dibs on the next outage?.. Our Internet is too dependent on a small list of companies. Some of which are laying people off rather than investing in the technology we depend on.
When Apple doesn’t like something about your configuration they’ll spit out arbitrary errors like that.
I got an error like that at work when someone was trying to do forgot password. Turns out you can’t reset your password in settings or safari if another user account is signed into find my Mac. Dumbest fucking limitation. It worked in chrome I think.
