The "iCloud Storage Is Full" Bug

Introduction

Yesterday, I took a lot of new photos using my iPhone 13 Pro. When I tried to sync them to iCloud, I found the status became “Your iCloud Storage is Full”. I was surprised because I have a 50 GB iCloud storage plan and there was still 15 GB available.

In this blog post, I would like to share my experience of this bug and how it was resolved.

The “iCloud Storage Is Full” Bug

When I got this problem, I tried restarting my iPhone and it did not work. I also contacted Apple support, tried many of their suggestions, wasted one hour without getting the problem fixed. They even suggested me to upgrade my iCloud storage plan. If Apple was going to pay for the upgrade, I would be happy to do so. However, I did not want to pay for the upgrade because I still had 15 GB available and apparently it was a problem from Apple.

A key observation was, depsite the fact that the status showed “Your iCloud Storage is Full”, some photos were still being uploaded to iCloud slowly. So I thought the syncing process was still working, it was just the status was wrong. To accelerate the syncing process, I put my iPhone on charge. After roughly 20 minutes, the syncing process was completed and the status became normal.

Almost spent money on a fault that Apple should be responsible for.