Bloomberg’s Gurman says he’s been “bitten” by a “nasty” iPhone and T-Mobile bug
You might be familiar with the physical SIM card that you normally put into your phone’s SIM slot allowing it to make phone calls, send text messages, and connect to internet services. The SIM card allows your phone to connect with your carrier. An eSIM is a digital SIM that is connected to the phone’s motherboard and is activated by calling your carrier. The first iPhone models to use an eSIM were 2018’s iPhone XR and iPhone XS.
There are a couple of workarounds that might help
Gurman disseminated his complaint in a tweet that read, “There is a very nasty iPhone and @TMobile bug where iMessage and FaceTime for a device’s phone number will randomly deactivate and there is no way to reactivate it. The only solution that worked for me is getting a new physical SIM card. An extremely disappointing issue.” Gurman said that as far as he can tell, the bug was wreaking havoc on iOS 15.4, iOS 15.5, and iOS 15.6 beta 1.
Obviously, we were exaggerating about the complexity involved, but this should work. Others said that deactivating the eSIM and reactivating it worked like a charm while others just activated a new eSIM. Another Twitter user explained what happened to him.
T-Mobile reps say that Apple couldn’t solve the problem
“Last week my eSIM for T-Mobile on my 13 Pro Max in the middle of the day deactivated itself and in settings kept trying to reactivate but said no service and eSIM said phone not allowed. Had to get T-Mobile to reissue new eSIM after they stupidly tried other things that did not work including want me to do a reset network settings. None of which worked.”
So the Bloomberg writer pointed out that he personally went directly to T-Mobile, rather than Apple. Why? Because he assumed that Apple would be unable to solve the problem. He said, “There isn’t any troubleshooting they’d offer that I didn’t already try.” He wasn’t wrong.
This bug is all over the place, even outside of the U.S. If we can return to the magic Twitter board (which these days smells like Musk), check out this response: “This happened with me in India with Airtel. I did every possible thing to activate it but it kept loading and eventually showed could not activate. Had to swap the sim card and it worked!”
