Is it the only app doing this? Check your available storage, if this is happening to multiple apps it’s usually a sign of extremely low available storage which will eventually throw your phone into a boot loop. If not, as suggested above, a forced restart should fix it.

I have doubts that actually happened. This might be a tweet over simplifying the situation. Those call records might have been in the iCloud backup.

Edit: I meant those chats and call records. Plus call records are also a carrier thing, that’s fairly easy for them to obtain.

It depends what kind of unlock we’re talking about.

Activation Lock removal? Yes it can be done using a death certificate but the device has to be wiped and it grants zero access to the existing data on the device. It simply means the phone can be activated & signed into by anyone else after wiping it.

iCloud backups without the new advanced data protection feature can be obtained by law enforcement, AFAIK Apple does cooperate. Which is more of a reason to enable this new security feature.

Apple cannot however unlock the local contents of a phone with a passcode. People ask for this all the time, there simply isn’t a backdoor for this and it’s by design. The only thing anyone at apple can do without the passcode is erase the device. Sure, technically you can try a few guesses, but the phone will eventually disable itself (at first for a specified time period, then eventually permanently until it’s erased) and I promise you there is nothing anyone at apple can do. At this point the only hope is that someone had this customer’s Apple ID & password or are an existing legacy contact, which had to have been set up by the user in question. I don’t believe apple allows access to an iCloud account even if it’s a death and family members are requesting access, unless it’s law enforcement asking for it and I’m sure they need some sort of a warrant. But just saying “hey my relative died” does not get you access into their account, at all.