Why Did S3 Lock Us Out?

[mapenn]

My wife has an ATT Galaxy S3. After nearly a year of no problems, last week it suddenly greeted her with a password screen (emergency calls only). Now, she had never setup a password; and we tried every logical / possible password that we would have ever used. Nothing worked. The SIM card DID work in another device. We reached out to ATT and the mobile store - who each told us that the only solution was to do a factory reset. Which I finally gave up and did.

So, my question is "why" did this happen? What would trigger the device to lock up like this with a password that we never setup?

As you can imagine, my wife doesn't want to spend hours getting all her settings / apps / music set back up until she understands what happened.

Thanks for any insight that you could provide!

 

[Golfdriver97]

My wife has an ATT Galaxy S3. After nearly a year of no problems, last week it suddenly greeted her with a password screen (emergency calls only). Now, she had never setup a password; and we tried every logical / possible password that we would have ever used. Nothing worked. The SIM card DID work in another device. We reached out to ATT and the mobile store - who each told us that the only solution was to do a factory reset. Which I finally gave up and did.

So, my question is "why" did this happen? What would trigger the device to lock up like this with a password that we never setup?

As you can imagine, my wife doesn't want to spend hours getting all her settings / apps / music set back up until she understands what happened.

Thanks for any insight that you could provide!

Did you get an update before this happened?

 

[mapenn]

not that we are aware of. She doesn't remember seeing any notifications about a pending update.

 

[Golfdriver97]

not that we are aware of. She doesn't remember seeing any notifications about a pending update.

This issue isn't isolated. I have seen it before, but still u sure as to why.

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