Comment by thitcanh

It’s actually a series of unfortunate events:

    He was expecting a trade-in kit that never arrived
    He contacted them but got no answer
    They contacted him but got no answer (also because the reply address did not exist)
    The Apple Card autopay failed because the bank number changed

So at some point his Apple ID was locked without further communication from Apple, which should have sent at least another email and text message about it.

Apple failed in at least 4 points in this process and it lead to a week of downtime. His only mistake was missing one (unanswerable) Alert email.