The problem is if something goes wrong with amazon, google or apple, you can get locked into a giant hole.
If you're ok with being treated that way, that's fine - I'm not.
Either way, it doesn't actually matter - even if it's 100% the author's fault, NINE days to get to a human who can resolve the issue is enough of a reason to avoid having too many of your services centralized with apple.
Given the entire post is them making dumb errors and then blaming others it would be in line with the rest of it.
sounds like the apple support person never thought to ask or check if they had unpaid bills for those frozen services. (facepalm)
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.