Facebook leaves an account online indefinitely, Google deletes one after two years, and Apple takes a death certificate as grounds for deletion. The same death produces three different outcomes.
What happens next depends on the policy each company wrote, not on anything you or the family decide later. Those policies fall into three groups. Some accounts stay live until somebody reports the death, some run down a timer of their own, and some close on notice. Which group an account sits in changes what you can still recover 30 days from now.
Every one of these processes starts with paperwork. The paperwork a company accepts is narrower than you’d expect, and a will is often the wrong document to send. Reporting a death and acting for an estate are two different jobs.
None of these routes gets you a password. Google states that it cannot provide passwords or other login details, and most of the industry says much the same thing.
The pages behind this one cover each company in detail, with the documents it asks for and the timing it publishes. Copy what you can first, though. Anything that ends in a closure or a cancellation can destroy files, so the copy comes first every time. Saving the photos and files explains why that order matters more than speed does.
The company also decides how much to hand over. A copy of the data can stand in for account access, and partial access is a normal outcome. If you’re expecting to log in as the person who died, almost nothing here works that way.
No single rule settles all of it. Three layers share the decision between them, and this page covers exactly one of them: what the company itself does.
Accounts persist, expire, or close on notice
Six of the services covered here do nothing at all until somebody files a report. The account stays live in the meantime. Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Reddit, and Amazon all sit in that group. None of them watches death records, so a profile can keep collecting birthday messages for years.
An Amazon account in that state keeps on billing the card behind it. Its bereavement channel can stop subscriptions before the full paperwork arrives. That’s the one part of the process you can move on quickly, and the copying still comes first.
Meta describes memorializing an account on its help pages as protection against attempted logins and fraudulent activity. The freeze is the point of it.
Once an account carries that status, the people who hold the password lose their access along with everybody else. Anyone’s report can trigger it. If you’ve been reading old messages by signing in, you can lose that route overnight. So copy anything worth keeping before a report goes anywhere near the company.
Three services run a clock instead. Google deletes an account after two years without a sign-in. Discord schedules deletion after two years of disuse, and X removes accounts under a 30-day login expectation.
Apple sits in a third group. Its iCloud terms allow deletion once a death certificate arrives, unless the person named a legacy contact while they were alive.
Those terms also carry a one-year inactivity window and a right to close an account on 30 days’ notice. They include a no-right-of-survivorship clause as well. The timing is where the three groups differ. A persistent account gives you and the family months of room, while Apple’s terms allow deletion as soon as the certificate arrives.
What access means when a company grants it
Access is a narrow word here. Under the model law behind most state statutes, a company chooses between full access, partial access, and handing over a copy of the data. The choice belongs to the company, not you.
A copy is what most families end up receiving. No company examined for this site releases login credentials, and several of them say so in plain terms.
Apple builds a separate legacy account rather than opening the original one. X states that it cannot provide account access to anyone, regardless of their relationship to the person who died. Discord refuses access, disclosure, and changes of any kind. Snapchat offers deletion and grants no access at all.
Facebook’s legacy contact shows how thin these powers can run. The contact can pin a post, change the profile photo, request removal, and download an archive if the person had turned that setting on. There’s no login, and no way to read the messages.
Instagram grants a designee nothing at all. Nobody can change a memorialized account there, and removal is the other route open to you with the right papers in hand.
LinkedIn will memorialize a profile at anyone’s request, and close one at the request of an estate representative. Closure deletes the data within 30 days. So your copying has to happen before that request goes in. Whether a copy of the data covers what an estate needs is a question for the lawyer handling it.
Amazon and Snapchat both assume in their published wording that somebody living holds the credentials. Amazon’s bereavement page invites a survivor with the account email or phone number to sign in or reset the password. Logging in with their password covers what those invitations settle and what they leave open.
Reporting a death and acting for an estate differ
Almost every company runs two separate paths. Anyone can report a death, and an obituary is often proof enough for that first path.
Acting with the authority of an estate is the harder half of the work. LinkedIn accepts Letters of Administration, Letters Testamentary, Letters of Representation, or a court order for a closure request. It expressly rejects wills, trusts, powers of attorney, identity documents, and screenshots. Most people reach for the will first, and it sits on the rejected list.
Instagram’s list was confirmed through search-indexed copies. Proof of death freezes an account there, and deletion asks for a birth certificate, a death certificate, and proof of authority. Discord asks for a death certificate or a coroner’s report, proof of relationship, and proof of who the requester is.
Amazon asks for a death certificate, proof of estate authority, a photo ID, and the account email or phone number. The overlap between these lists is large but never exact.
It’s a tedious errand, so order several certified copies of the death certificate at the outset. The paperwork every platform asks for goes through the court documents in more detail than this page does. Which document a probate court issues, and what it covers, is a question for the lawyer handling the estate. The probate court that appoints an executor is the place to ask which documents it issues.
Incapacity is easier to document than death. An agent under a durable power of attorney files the instrument and a self-certification, with no death certificate and no court appointment. The living person can still consent, sign in, and receive the two-factor codes that no certificate replaces.
That gap runs the other way from what you’d expect. The paperwork gets heavier after a death rather than lighter, and the one person who could have signed anything is gone.
Where the published record runs out
Two of these companies publish nothing usable. A search on July 28, 2026 found no TikTok article about a user who has died. The Remembering label in consumer guides traces to a code discovery by a data miner in March 2024. TikTok never announced it.
An in-app reporting path appears in third-party write-ups, and no TikTok source confirms it. The privacy policy for the United States is silent too. The company’s terms do bar sharing access and transferring an account, and that much is stated plainly.
Reddit is the second gap in the record. A search on the same date found no dedicated policy there, leaving self-service deletion and a generic request form as the routes.
An absence like that decays quietly, because a policy can appear without any notice at all. The date on this page matters for that reason. One widely repeated claim about X is wrong on the record as it stands today. A story circulating in 2026 says the company launched memorializing in late 2025, and it traces to a single unsourced marketing article.
Twitter announced such a feature in November 2019 and never shipped it. X still offers deactivation and nothing more. Its terms describe the account as a personal license that cannot be assigned to anybody else.
This site didn’t verify every service a household is likely to use. Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft consumer email, PayPal, Venmo, and Cash App all sit outside the research behind these pages.
Every claim here carries the date it was checked, July 28, 2026. Settings paths and feature names change without notice. So read the company’s own help page before filing anything, and write down the date you read it. A printed copy of that page, filed with the estate documents, settles later arguments about what the policy said.