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Resolve an iOS FaceTime/Messages activation error

After reinstalling iOS 8.4.1 on my iPad Air (due to some issues with the 9.0 developer betas), I was unable to use either FaceTime or Messages. When I'd enter my iCloud credentials in the setup box for either service, I'd be greeted by a long delay, followed by this error message:

FaceTime Activation
An error occurred during activation. Try again.

When I searched on this message, I got lots of hits, including the first one, which points to this article:

The advice in this article matches what I was told by Apple Support: back up the iPad, erase it, set it up as new, make sure Messages/FaceTime works, then restore from backup. And for me, it seemed to work at first: Everything worked fine until I did the restore, and that would then break Messages/FaceTime. Ugh.

Apple Support told me the backup must be corrupted, and I'd just need to start fresh. But with over 200 apps, and who knows how many that don't sync data via iCloud or other service, I did not want to do this.

But then I noticed something. Something completely self-induced. And that something turned out to be both the problem and the solution. So just what was that something? Nothing more than a bit of time travel…

I use my iPad for a lot of things, including gaming. And some games—very annoyingly—have timers that limit what you can do until the timer advances. In some of these games (mostly the poorly-written ones), the timers run locally on your iPad. So you can advance the timers* by manually setting your iPad's clock forward, then relaunching the game.

* Call this cheating if you like; I call it "playing the game when I have time to play the game, not when the dev wants me to play the game."

Usually when I do this, I then set the clock back immediately (the games don't seem to notice this backwards time travel at all). But for some reason (I blame the kids), I must've gotten distracted and left my iPad running in the future for some period of time. I noticed, for instance, that I had app updates that were shown as being installed in late November of this year—a few months from now. Whoops!

I began to think this might be causing the FaceTime/Messages activation issues. But I wasn't sure how to solve it. While brainstorming with my buddy Kirk, I thought that maybe if I jumped back to the future, I might be able to activate FaceTime and Messages, as the iPad would be back in what it thought to be the "right" period of time.

So I set my clock forward to December of this year, and attempted to sign in on FaceTime and Messages. Neither actually seemed to work, but they didn't throw the error message either—they just sat at Verifying.

While they were sitting there thinking about verifying, I switched the time back to automatically set, then went back to look at Messages and FaceTime in Settings. At first, nothing was different…but then, after a minute or so, both popped up as logged in and enabled. Hooray!

So net net, I caused myself much trouble by playing with time. (That's what always happens in the movies, right? I should've known better.) If you've been similarly bit by the activation issue, and the erase/restore method linked above doesn't work for you…perhaps a little time travel will do the trick.

7 thoughts on “Resolve an iOS FaceTime/Messages activation error”

  1. Just Bunk everything which you will get from all these type websites. Nothing gonna work . I was suffering with this FACETIME ACTIVATION ERROR for my iPad Mini 2 from last 1 year, and tried all steps but the problem was same.

    Don't worry.
    Just call APPLE ONLINE SUPPORT.Tell them your problem and they will ask to RESET, RESTORE,APPLE ID CHANGE ETC. I'm sure these steps will not work ( didn't work for me from last 1 year until i called apple support). After these dramas, they will transfer the call to their senior.
    He/She will ask the same procedures and ultimately they will reset your apple i'd by asking your security questions and after 24 hours,it will start working.
    ( Once again I am telling, Its my practical experience and I have found this most successful step rather than resetting and restoring) .
    Thanks to Swati-Apple Customer support executive.

  2. Just remove your device and add in apple account. It should work. I had the same issue and fixed this way.

  3. I found that using something other than icloud.com caused the problem for me. Apple seems to require a user to use an icloud.com email address when linking devices. I had my icloud set up with my gmail account and received the same error messages. I created an icloud email and activated everything using the icloud email and i received no error messages. Everything works now.

  4. Your Apple ID may be blocked due to an incomprehensible situation. I called many operators and wrote off many and no one could help me. I am from Ukraine and wrote to Russia, and then they contacted me and unblocked my Apple ID. Great thanks to them.

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