The original poster was paying for iCloud storage with their apple card, which is an Apple service.

But he said the iCloud subscription was not due or past due. which means Apple did not try to charge his card for the iCloud service and then locked his account because they couldn't

The iCloud subscription was not past due. [1]

1. https://twitter.com/dcurtis/status/1366485756546539520

It can't be just that. iCloud storage and Apple Music were two of the subscriptions I was paying for, to get that sweet 3% cash back.

It's possible that the card was maxed out and payments for the subscription failed, maybe? I caught mine before that happened.

Edit: a sibling comment makes it clear that that isn't what happened: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26308468

It could be just random rule enforcement.

I manually pay my electric and gas. I can skip if for a month (or two) and not a problem. Except sometimes (once)..

I have no idea why. I feel its just some random thing depending on who's running the dept that day.

We experienced the same thing in College when after paying our electric bill for two months, they shut our power off without notice. Upon digging it was because we were still listed as "Residents" on the bills we were paying.

While this is frustratingly common with things like the App Store where every choice requires human reviewer judgment, I suspect this is probably an automated thing.

Perhaps it’s a new policy though which would explain the difference.

Don’t take a simple tweet as a final word, that’s how misinformation spreads

I'm not taking anything as final word. But I trust the author of the original Tweet to not make an over-reactive, uninformed post. That I'm curious what the difference between his situation and the above poster's is.

The same is true for a HackerNews comment.

Original poster observed A, then observed B, and concluded causality

>>So what is the difference?

Your expectation that a policy or rule would be enforced evenly across the organization..

I think at this point it is clear that Big Tech do not have any policy, rule or terms of service that is enforced with anything that could be reasonably be considered "uniform"

Routine things like what happens when payments get missed is usually automated.

There are a lot of places in tech where human opinion is interjected introducing variability, but I doubt this is one of them.