Google says it can’t give out passwords or other login details, and the other big platforms say much the same. Nobody hands you the password.
Apple hands over a separate legacy account rather than the real one, and X won’t give account access to anyone at all. That leaves you two doors. A platform can freeze the account in place, a state most of them call memorialization, or it can shut the account down. The two differ in one way that counts, because a freeze can sometimes be undone and a closure never can.
Closing deletes the photos, the messages, and everything else the account still held on the day your request went in. Copy it all out first. Work through saving the photos and files before you ask any company to close or delete a thing.
You’re really making two different asks here. Reporting a death is something almost anyone can do, but acting with the powers of an estate takes papers from a court.
LinkedIn will freeze a profile on an obituary from a colleague, but it wants court-issued letters before it closes one. That split runs right across the industry. The paperwork page covers the papers, and this page covers what each company does once they land. Whether your estate holds the power a company is asking for is a question for the lawyer handling it.
Doing nothing is a choice too, and it plays out in three ways, one for each kind of company. Some accounts wait forever. Others run down a clock, and Apple’s terms make deletion the default unless the person named a Legacy Contact.
None of this happens on its own. Each of these routes starts with someone filling in a form, and most of them end weeks later.
What happens when nobody reports the death
Six of the services this site checked leave an account right where it stands until someone reports the death. The account stays live with no end date. Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Reddit, and Amazon all sit in that group, and none of them goes looking. Amazon adds a second headache, because its subscriptions keep on billing while the account waits for a report.
Meta describes that freeze as protection against attempted logins and fraudulent activity, not as a courtesy to you. A live account is still a door. Nobody at these companies watches for the gap between an account gone quiet and an account whose owner died.
Three services run a clock instead. Google deletes an account after two years without a sign-in, and Discord deletes one after two years unused.
X sits in the same group, subject to removal under a 30-day login expectation in its terms. The clocks take no notice of papers. Estate papers won’t pause one, and your family can’t stop a clock once it has started running. Google’s Inactive Account Manager works the same way, and the family can’t speed its timer up either.
Apple runs the third pattern, and it points the other way from the two above. Its default is deletion. Apple’s terms allow deletion once a death certificate arrives, unless the account already carries a Legacy Contact.
Here’s the part that catches families. Send Apple a death certificate and you can end the account instead of opening it, the reverse of what people expect.
The order of these steps counts for more than the choice of door, and the export always comes before the report. Check the clock on each service. An account with two years of runway can wait, and an iCloud account with a certificate on its way can’t. Work out where each of these accounts sits among the three groups before you send anything to anyone.
Memorializing freezes an account, closing ends it
Facebook runs three of these tools, and the person has to set two of them up while they’re still alive. Anyone can ask for the third. A legacy contact and a standing choice to delete at death both come from the account holder.
The freeze comes from a report instead. A legacy contact gets narrow powers, and they can pin a post, change the profile photo, or ask for removal.
They can also download an archive of the account, but only where the holder switched that option on. The powers stop there. A legacy contact can’t log in to the account, and can’t read a single one of the messages inside it. Meta’s terms bar sharing a password or handing an account to someone else, so there’s no way around that.
A peer-reviewed conference paper from 2016, written in part by Facebook staff, set out two ways this design fails. The chosen contact gets no automatic notice. Someone can hold that role for years without knowing it, and the setting can sit on an account nobody living knows about.
The second failure cuts deeper. A freeze removes account access even for family members who hold the password, and anyone’s report can trigger one.
Instagram works another way, because it offers no tool at all before a death and no powers to anyone after one. Nobody can change a frozen profile. Freezing an Instagram account takes proof of death, and deleting one takes a good deal more than that. The list for deletion, confirmed through search-indexed copies, runs to a birth certificate, a death certificate, and proof of power over the estate.
LinkedIn lets anyone ask for a freeze, but it holds closure back for whoever the court has put in charge. Closure there is permanent. LinkedIn deletes the profile data within 30 days of a closure request, so your export has to come first.
The papers decide which door opens
The papers sort the requests. The LinkedIn help page shows that split more plainly than most.
It takes Letters of Administration, Letters Testamentary, Letters of Representation, or a court order for a closure. It turns five other things away. Wills, trusts, powers of attorney, identity papers, and screenshots all fail, however solid they look in the folder. A will naming you as executor doesn’t carry the power of the letters a court hands out later.
Nearly every platform process starts with letters testamentary and certified copies of the death certificate. Reporting a death takes far less. Facebook takes an obituary or a paper from the death-certificate class to freeze a profile, and almost anyone can send one.
The smaller services ask for their own mix. Discord’s process wants a death certificate or a coroner’s report, plus proof of relationship.
Discord also wants proof of who the requester is, and it turns down access, disclosure, and changes of any kind. Deletion is all it offers. X asks for proof of who the requester is and a death certificate, then deactivates rather than freezing the account. A second route exists at X for incapacity, and that one runs through a power of attorney instead.
Snapchat sits at the awkward end of this, because its one documented path assumes someone already holds the credentials. That cuts against its own terms. It asks for the login or the linked email address, and logging in with their password sets out the risk.
Some services offer nothing but deletion
Some companies offer one outcome only. X deactivates an account and does nothing else, and its terms treat the account as a personal license that can’t pass on.
A story going round in 2026 says X launched a freeze option late in 2025, and the trail behind it goes nowhere. It rests on one marketing article. The claim echoes a feature Twitter announced in November 2019 and never shipped, so there’s little point hunting for it. X says it can’t give account access to anyone, whatever their relationship to the person who died.
TikTok is the harder case, because this site’s research turned up no official policy for a dead user’s account. The Help Center indexes list none. TikTok’s United States privacy policy says nothing about it either, as searched on July 28, 2026.
A remembering label turns up in guides. It traces back to a code find by a data miner in March 2024, and TikTok has never announced any such thing.
An in-app report path shows up in third-party write-ups, and no TikTok source this site could reach backs it up. TikTok’s terms bar sharing and transfer. Reddit lands in much the same place, with no policy for a dead user found anywhere as of July 28, 2026. Self-service deletion and a general request form both exist, and a Reddit account otherwise sits there until someone acts.
Absence findings go stale faster than anything else on this site, because a policy can appear without any announcement. Check the company’s own pages first. Then take the account list, the clocks, and the finished export to the lawyer handling the estate before you close a thing.