Nobody likes thinking about this. But if you have a bank account, an email address, a phone, a Netflix subscription, or a folder of photos stored somewhere in the cloud — and you almost certainly have all of these — then at some point, someone is going to have to deal with them.
The question is whether that someone will know what they're doing. Or whether they'll spend months fighting with customer service teams, solicitors, and automated systems that were never designed with bereavement in mind.
Here is what actually happens to your online accounts when you die in the UK — and what you can do right now so the people you leave behind don't have to figure it out alone.
First, the uncomfortable truth
Most online accounts are not designed to outlive you.
When you sign up to a platform, you agree to a set of terms and conditions. Buried somewhere in those terms is almost always a clause that says the account belongs to you personally and cannot be transferred. Your login credentials are yours. Your data is yours. And when you die, the legal right to access that account dies with you — at least in the eyes of the platform.
This creates a practical problem for your family. They may know the account exists. They may even know the password. But without following the platform's official bereavement process, they have no legal right to access it. And in many cases, that process is slow, bureaucratic, and requires documentation that takes weeks to gather.
This is not theoretical. It happens to families across the UK every single day.
What happens to your bank accounts
This is usually the most urgent concern, and thankfully the most straightforward.
When someone dies, their bank accounts are frozen as soon as the bank is notified. The accounts don't disappear — the money doesn't go anywhere — but access is suspended until probate is granted or the estate is settled. To release funds, the next of kin or executor needs to provide the bank with a death certificate and, depending on the amount involved, a Grant of Probate. For smaller estates this can be relatively quick. For larger ones it can take months.
The practical issue is that families often don't know which banks the deceased used, or how many accounts they had. If your only record of a bank account is a card in your wallet and a login in your head, there's a reasonable chance your family will never find it. Unclaimed bank accounts in the UK run to hundreds of millions of pounds.
What you can do: Leave a clear list of every financial account — bank, savings, ISA, investment — including the institution name and account type. You don't need to leave passwords for these. Just the signposts.
What happens to your email
Email is complicated, and the answer depends almost entirely on which provider you use.
Gmail (Google): Google has an Inactive Account Manager feature that lets you decide in advance what happens to your account after a period of inactivity. You can choose to share data with trusted contacts or have the account deleted automatically. If you haven't set this up, your family can submit a request through Google's deceased user process — but it involves submitting documentation and there's no guarantee they'll get access to the contents.
Outlook (Microsoft): Microsoft's terms of service state that accounts are non-transferable. Family members can request account closure and sometimes a download of emails, but access is not guaranteed and the process involves submitting a death certificate and other documentation to a dedicated team.
Apple iCloud: Apple's approach is strict. Unless the deceased set up a Legacy Contact in advance — a relatively new feature — family members have no route to accessing the account. Apple has historically refused access even with death certificates and court orders, citing their encryption model.
Other providers: Most smaller email providers have no formal bereavement process at all. Access is effectively lost unless the family already has the password.
The contents of someone's email account often hold years of correspondence, financial records, tax documents, login credentials for other services, and things that cannot be replaced. Losing access to all of it because nobody knew the password is a surprisingly common and entirely avoidable situation.
What you can do: Set up the Legacy Contact or Inactive Account Manager features on your key accounts, or leave the access details in a secure location your family can find.
What happens to social media
The major platforms have developed formal processes for dealing with deceased users, though the options vary.
Facebook and Instagram (Meta): A family member can request that an account be memorialised — turned into a tribute page where friends can leave messages but the account can no longer be logged into. Alternatively, they can request removal. Meta does allow for a Legacy Contact to be set in advance, giving that person limited ability to manage the memorialised account. They cannot, however, read private messages or log in as the deceased.
Twitter/X: Family members can request account deactivation. There is no memorialisation option. Private tweets and messages are not accessible to anyone other than the account holder.
LinkedIn: LinkedIn will deactivate and remove an account upon notification of death. There is no legacy or memorialisation feature.
TikTok, Snapchat, and others: Most smaller platforms have basic removal processes but nothing more sophisticated. Access to content is generally not possible.
The honest summary is that social media accounts are largely inaccessible to family members after death, and the platforms prefer to memorialise or remove rather than hand over access. If there are posts, photos, or messages on these platforms that you want preserved or passed on, your best option is to download them yourself while you can.
What happens to subscriptions
Netflix, Spotify, Amazon Prime, Disney+, Sky — these subscriptions will simply keep billing whatever payment method is attached to them until somebody cancels them.
If your family doesn't know which subscriptions you have, and doesn't have access to the bank account or card being charged, they can continue billing for months or even years. It's an inconvenience rather than a catastrophe, but it's a completely avoidable one.
What you can do: Keep a list of your active subscriptions with the rough monthly cost. It takes ten minutes to write and saves a considerable amount of confusion.
What happens to cryptocurrency and digital assets
This is where things get serious.
Cryptocurrency held in a self-custody wallet — where you control the private keys — is mathematically inaccessible without those keys. There is no customer service. There is no password reset. There is no court order that can unlock a Bitcoin wallet if the private key is lost.
If you hold crypto and you haven't made arrangements for your keys and seed phrases to be accessible after your death, that money is gone. Not dormant. Not frozen. Gone permanently.
The same applies to NFTs, digital collectibles, and any other blockchain-based assets. Crypto held on an exchange like Coinbase or Binance is slightly more recoverable, since those platforms have customer support and bereavement processes — but they still require documentation, and the process is not quick.
What you can do: If you hold any meaningful amount of cryptocurrency, your seed phrases and private keys need to be stored somewhere secure and accessible to the right person after your death. This is not optional. It is the difference between your family inheriting an asset and inheriting nothing.
What happens to photos and documents in the cloud
iCloud, Google Photos, Dropbox, OneDrive — these services hold what for many people is their entire photographic record. Years of family photos. Videos of children growing up. Documents that exist nowhere else.
Access to cloud storage follows the same rules as email and social media — it depends on the platform, the account's security settings, and whether any legacy arrangements have been made.
Apple's iCloud, as noted, is particularly difficult to access without a pre-arranged Legacy Contact. Google Photos is somewhat more accessible through Google's deceased user process. Dropbox and OneDrive are variable.
The photographs stored in someone's cloud account are irreplaceable. Unlike a bank account where the money can be recovered through probate, if access to a photo library is permanently lost, those photos are gone.
What you can do: Periodically download your most important photos to a physical drive. And set up a Legacy Contact on any platform that offers one.
The legal position in the UK
Under UK law, digital assets are generally treated as part of your estate — meaning they pass under the terms of your will, or under the rules of intestacy if you die without one.
The practical problem is that the law hasn't quite caught up with how digital assets work. A will can state that your digital assets should pass to a specific person, but that doesn't give that person the technical ability to access them. The platform still controls the account, and the platform's terms of service still take precedence in practice.
There is also the question of the Computer Misuse Act 1990, which makes it a criminal offence to access a computer system without authorisation. In strict legal terms, a family member who accesses a deceased person's accounts using their password — even with every good intention — may technically be committing an offence if the platform hasn't authorised that access.
In practice, prosecutions for this kind of thing are vanishingly rare. But it illustrates why having formal arrangements in place is genuinely better than relying on family members to work it out themselves.
Under GDPR Article 20, you have the right to receive your personal data from any organisation that holds it in a portable format while you are alive. This right does not automatically transfer to your family after you die — but exercising it yourself in advance, and storing that data securely, is a practical way of ensuring it isn't lost.
What you should do today
None of this requires specialist help to begin. It requires an afternoon and a willingness to think about something uncomfortable.
Make the list. Write down every online account that matters — banking, email, cloud storage, social media, subscriptions, crypto. For each one, note the email address used to register and where the password can be found.
Set up legacy features. Google Inactive Account Manager. Apple Legacy Contact. Facebook Legacy Contact. These take fifteen minutes to set up and make an enormous difference.
Store it somewhere secure but findable. A document on your laptop that nobody knows about is not a plan. The information needs to be somewhere the right people can access it when they need it — without also being somewhere that creates a security risk in the meantime.
Give someone a key. You do not need to explain every system and service you have set up. Just hand the right person a password, a phrase, a code — and ask them to keep it safe. Tell them they will know what to do with it when the time comes. If you have used an encrypted vault service, the delivery will explain itself when it arrives. The key is all they need to open it. That handover takes thirty seconds. It is considerably easier than a long conversation about platforms and processes — and considerably more likely to actually happen.
Consider a dedicated service. Tools like Holdfast are built specifically for this problem — an encrypted vault where you store everything your family would need, with a delivery mechanism that ensures it reaches the right people if you're no longer here to hand it over yourself.
The conversation nobody wants to have
There is a reason most people don't do any of this. Death is uncomfortable to think about. Digital estate planning sounds technical and cold. And there is always something more pressing to deal with today.
But the families who spend months fighting with Google and Apple and banks — trying to piece together a digital life from the outside, without passwords or instructions or any of the access that would make it manageable — those families almost always say the same thing afterwards.
"He would have sorted this out if he'd known how much trouble it would cause."
The sorting out doesn't take long. The not doing it can take the people you leave behind a very long time indeed.