On Tuesday, July 8, 2025 something very weird happened to my iPhone 16 on T-Mobile with an eSIM in the U.S.; personal device. Sharing the just in case anyone else experiences similar.
This all happened on an iPhone 16 (MYD33LL/A) running iOS 18.5.
At around 7:00pm, I was looking at my iPhone home screen and noticed that the temperatures my weather app on my iPhone 16 (running iOS 18.5) suddenly changed from Fahrenheit (U.S. region) to Celsius. Like it was 80-90F and the app was showing temperatures that were 20-30C. Very odd because I didn’t do anything that would cause that.
I went to check “Language & Region” in “Settings -> General > Language & Region” saw it was oddly set to “world” so I changed it to “United States.” Waited for the change to take effect, it supposedly restarts your phone, and nothing changed. It didn’t fix the issue the first two times I did that.
Then on maybe the 3rd try, I got a weird set of screens like I reset my iPhone with the final thing being a password verification screen for an Apple account with an email I don’t know and have ever used. It was something like [email protected] or [email protected].
Seeing that, I held down the side button and the up volume button to shut down the iPhone. With the iPhone powered off, I started it again and things went back to normal. “Language & Region” are fine and the Apple account email is back to my email.
But how? It could have been an iPhone setup somewhere else gone awry. The iPhone 16 uses an eSIM. So it could have been an accidental dupe eSIM?
PS: I didn’t receive any SMS messages, emails or notifications of anything about anything. I simply saw temperatures in Celsius and my “Language & Region” set to “world” which is not a region that is offered by Apple during the initial iPhone setup or even afterwards in “Settings -> General > Language & Region.” Very odd.
PPS: No other Apple device that is associated with the iPhone Apple ID was affected. Two-factor authentication for the Apple ID is set, its password hasn’t been changed but again, two-factor authentication is set.
PPPS: I just sent an email to [email protected] that is basically a condensed version of this post just in case this is a novel (aka: zero-day) exploit.
