Why Won’t My Password Work?

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's explore what might be the most asked tech question of all time. 

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So anybody that works in tech support or answers tech questions often hears the question, Why isn't my password working? Like for any question there's always an answer. It's just figuring out which is the correct answer. So let's explore some of the reasons why a password may not work when you try it when you're logging into a website, an app, or even your computer. 

The most obvious and also the most common reason that a password might be wrong is simply a mistyped character. Perhaps the character is the one next to another one on a keyboard or it sounds about the same and you simply type it wrong by accident. Usually trying a second time, maybe a little more slowly or carefully, will get it right. You can always try the technique of opening up a document, like TextEdit or in the Notes app, and typing it in in a place where you can actually see the password and maybe spot your mistake that way. Another reason a password could be wrong is that a character looks the same as another character. The two most common examples of that are the O key, particularly a capital O, and the number zero. In some fonts they are actually identical and in others they look very similar. You can see here the fourth character in this password it's hard to tell which one is the capital O and which one is the number zero. 

Another common one is lower case l and the number 1. In some fonts they look the same as well. There are a ton of other characters that can easily be mistaken for each other. So sometimes it pays to actually examine each character carefully.

Another thing that happens is sometimes case is mixed up. It's easy, say, to write down a lower case letter when you mean an upper case letter or when you're typing the password to type the wrong case. In almost all situations the case matters in passwords. So you have to type it the exact same way that you did when you set the password. An uppercase version of a letter and a lowercase version of that same letter are as different as any two other characters. 

Now tied in with that, of course, is the Caps Lock Key. This really gets a lot of people because usually when you're typing a password you don't see the characters you're typing. If you accidentally hit the Caps Lock Key then you could be typing uppercase letters when you mean lowercase letters and there's no way to tell on screen. So always glance at your Caps Lock Key and see if the light is On. You could always try typing the password into TextEdit or Notes to see what characters you're really typing. 

Another common one is the Extra Character. Sometimes adding an extra character, especially an invisible one, like if you add a space at the end of a password that's an actual character and it counts. The space at the end makes it a completely different password than the one you should be typing even if every other character is perfect. So you can have a space or something else in the beginning or the end or in the middle or maybe type a character twice. 

Now here's something a little bit different. Maybe you're typing exactly the password that you've written down or stored in some way. It's perfect. But the problem was that when you originally stored that password you wrote it down wrong. It could be that you setup a password a long time ago for a site. You wrote down the password with a mistake in what you wrote. You haven't had to log on again for a long time. Now that you're trying that password it's simply wrong. Well there really is no way to recover from this except to request a new password.

Of course that's the ultimate fallback for any of these problems. If you can't correct the mistake and figure out what's wrong you simple need to request a new password using the website or app or services system there. There's usually some sort of button or a link for, Forgot Your Password, or to request a new password or password reset. Eventually it's the only thing you can do when nothing else works to get the password right. 

Now another thing to consider is that the password is perfect but the ID is wrong. Usually the ID is your email address. But sometimes you can add your own ID like your name or a nickname or something like that. If you get that wrong then, of course, it doesn't matter what the password is. It's going to be looking for a different account. One with that ID. Now any of the reasons we talked about before could also apply to the ID. You could be adding an extra space. Typing an uppercase letter instead of a lowercase letter or just mistyping something like right here. I'd pay attention to both sides of the at @ symbol if you get something wrong even if something as simple as capitalization. On the other side of the @ symbol it's a different ID. Actually even more common than this is using the completely wrong ID. For instance, suppose you have two different email addresses. Most of us have more than one email address. Perhaps you signed up to the site with one email address but now you're trying to log on using another one. The password is just never going to work because it's not tied to an account with that ID. Sometimes it could even be the situation where you signed up using an email address one time and then you're trying to sign in again and you notice there's a little Sign on with Facebook or Sign On with your Apple ID. But if you try to use those it could be referencing a different account or an account you haven't even created yet. That's why there's a mismatch. The password is perfect. It's the ID that is wrong. 

Now so far everything I've talked about could be avoided by simply using a Password Manager. Either the one built into Safari or a third party manager like LastPass or OnePassword. These, of course, will never get your ID or your password wrong. You may still run into a problem where you accidentally stored the password wrong or maybe you updated the password at some point and for some reason because the way the webpage is coded it didn't get the update in the password manager. So you have an old password stored and it wants the new password which isn't there. So it always pays to check when you update a password to make sure the password manager got the new password and that is now recorded in place of the old one. 

Now even if you get the ID perfect and your password perfect you may still not be able to log on. One reason could be that it had nothing to do with you or your password. It's simply the site is having a problem right now. So you get an error message like this one. The error message is sometimes just vague enough to convince you that you typed the password wrong. For instance Password Not Accepted doesn't necessarily mean that you gave the wrong password. It just means the system didn't accept it right now. It could be that it's just down and trying it in five minutes or five hours could log you in just fine. Sometimes the messages are really vague just telling you there's a problem or there's a server error or it's unable to contact the host or something like that. Don't assume after you enter a password and then click the login button that an error message means the password is wrong. It could mean the site is down. 

Now this is a rare case but I have to mention it. It could be that your ID and your password are fine but for some reason your account at that site or service was closed. So it's like you've never been there. Now there are various reasons why this may happen and if it turns out that you get Account Not Found or Account Closed or something like that then you simply need to contact support and find out what the next steps are. Sometimes it may not tell you that the account is closed. You may get something like Password Incorrect or it may just behave in the same way as if you have never been to the site before. 

Now it could also be that you're at the wrong site entirely. It could be a similar looking site or a site owned by the same company or somehow related but maybe they're separate things. For instance, MacMost has courses at both Udemy and at the MacMost Courses site. They're separate sites and you would have separate ID's and passwords to both of those. 

Now we get to the last reason and this is the really bad one. One that you're probably afraid of from the very beginning. That your account has been compromised! Somebody has either guessed your password because it was a weak password or perhaps they were able to get into your account some other way and now they've gone into your account, they've changed the password, and they have access to your account and you don't. The error message that you're going to get from the site is exactly the same as if the password is wrong because it is. The password has now been changed to something else. There's really nothing you can do to get back into the site except contact support for the owner of the site or service. You've got to start the process of getting your compromised account back. Of course how important this is depends upon the site. If it's your bank's website, for instance, you should probably get on the phone right away and try to get this sorted out. If it's a website with some content you don't care about that much then you probably just want to start using their support form online and see what they say. 

So when I talk about getting support from the site or service I mean something like this. If you can't log into your Apple ID account, that's iCloud, iTunes, anything to do with Apple, then you would start here at this page to get help from Apple so you can get back into your account. If the password isn't working to log into your Mac to get into the User Account then Apple has support starting with this page for various way to get back into your Mac. Hopefully you've set it up so you can use your Apple ID to get back into your Mac account if you don't have the correct password for your user account. There are similar pages for all sorts of other services from Goggle to Microsoft to Twitter to Facebook. There's always a place to go to get help if your password isn't working on that site or service. 

Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.