I currently own an iPhone 4S running 6.1.3. I jailbroke it a week or so ago after being forced off of 6.1.2 in July. This isn't my first time jailbreaking, and I am pretty computer savvy, so don't be afraid to get technical.
My issue first started when I had five new updates in Cydia for some of my packages. I distinctly remember Mobile Substrate, Pdanet, iCaughtU, and then there were two others I can't recall now.
When I first started, the download seemed to get stuck and after a few attempts of canceling and restarting the download, I finally got them to update. I was greeted with the Tap to Respring button as always and I proceeded with respringing.
Immediately once my phone comes back on, I am greeted with the iOS 6 Welcome Screen. It asks me to choose a WiFi network, and then it starts to activate my phone.
Every time, without fail, my iPhone gives me the following message:
Could Not Activate iPhone
Your iPhone could not be activated
because the activation server is
temporarily offline. Try connecting
your iPhone to iTunes to activate it, or try
again in a couple of minutes.
If the problem persists, contact Apple
Support at apple.com/support
Obviously, I can't walk into an Apple Store without them turning me away once they find out I'm jailbroken.
The most confusing part is whenever I plug my iPhone into my iMac, the computer fails to recognize it in any form or shape. It's not even charging the device, let alone acknowledging it in iTunes.
Right now, I'm extremely afraid that I've been locked out of activating my phone because I'm jailbroken. I don't know what to do, and my LAST RESORT is to do any kind of force-resetting that would require me to update to iOS 7.
iOS 7 eats my battery life and would essentially require me to get a new phone with how I use my device, so I consider any kind of restore an absolute LAST RESORT.
Hopefully it's an easier issue to solve than that.
If any more information is required, I will happily provide.
Edit #1
I tried seeing if I could rerun the process from p0sixspwn, but as soon as I open v1.0.7 of the app (freshly downloaded one hour ago), it tells me the attached device is unsupported, even when there's nothing there?
Best Answer
I had the same exact problem today. I didn't want to update to iOS 7 either, but after so many hours on google, this seemed the only way to make my phone useful again. I followed this http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1808 and although it made me have to lose my familiarity with iOS 6 (RIP), my phone is useful again.