Macbook forgot all passwords - now iMessage not working?

Hoping someone can shine some light on this - when I booted my MBP yesterday it had forgotten all passwords - like, everything. There was no password anywhere in the system or in those menubar apps we all love running in the background that it didn’t prompt me for as services started up (and it turns out there are LOTS haha)

The one service that doesn’t seem to have recovered is iMessage. Text messages to my iPhone are no longer showing up on my Mac, and I can’t send from my Mac Messages app either (they fail)
I have signed out of and back in to iMessage and my mobile number (as well as my icloud email id) shows as a valid iMessage destination in Message settings.

Anyone got any ideas?
Also, what might have caused this in the first place?

thanks
Tim

I can think of a couple scenarios. 1) You logged into the Guest account or some other account, not yours. 2) you booted in safe mode.

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thanks - wasn’t either of those things - my main user has a bunch of stuff installed for just that user and a very distinctive desktop image so I’d not accidentally logged-in as someone else.

Having never knowlingly booted in safe mode I don’t actually know what that entails - can it happen from power-up and would everything look the same, just be short all the passwords?

You boot into safe mode by holding Shift while powering up. It’s not hard, but not common either. It can take a very long time for the safe mode boot to happen. Most things are not loaded when Safe Mode starts. Not sure what “all my passwords” means – 1Password wasn’t working? Keychain was empty? Safari passwords were deleted?

Normally when my systems boots up, all the apps that run by default just get on with it - on this occasion anything that had ever had a username and password entered into it, had been forgotten.

icloud account
mail accounts
fantastical
Droplr

websites that had previously been happy remaining logged in

Obviously 1Password always requires the master password initially

It was very odd (and very time consuming)

I’ve rebooted multiple times - and imessage has sprung back into life now.

Strange.