Update, February 5, 5:00 PM— We've got our installation of the Lock & Alert app working now, after interacting with Equifax technical support. We'll be posting a follow-up article shortly. Our original story follows.

On Wednesday, the beleaguered credit reporting agency Equifax launched a new service to protect people from the risks of identity theft that the company vastly magnified with a breach of over 145 million people's credit records last year. The service, called Lock & Alert, is fronted by a mobile application and a Web application. It is intended to allow individuals to control access to their credit report on demand.

"Lock & Alert allows You to lock and unlock your EIS credit report ('Equifax credit report')," the services' terms of service agreement states. "Locking or unlocking your Equifax credit report usually takes less than a minute."

Except when it doesn't.

As Tara Siegel Bernard and Ron Lieber of the New York Times reported, the new service—which is different from a "freeze" in some ways that are not clear from a legal and regulatory standpoint—has not been working for some (and possibly all) mobile app users. The idea of the "lock" is that it can be undone in an instant with a swipe of the screen, without incurring a charge to freeze or unfreeze the report or having to provide a PIN number. But attempts by Siegel Bernard to lock her husband's credit report resulted in application timeouts.

Ars installed and attempted to configure the app. Here's a summary of our interactions with Lock & Alert, as of nearly 6 hours after initially contacting Equifax's help line:

I filled out the requested data to create an account, including birthdate, address, and Social Security Number. After completing the registration process, the app told me that the registration could not be completed, and to contact customer support. The app helpfully gave a button to click on to make that call. After 15 minutes on the customer support line, I was told that the account had been successfully created, and that I would be sent a password reset e-mail. I said that the password was not the problem, but agreed, and waited for the e-mail. The e-mail never came. I went into the app to attempt to reset the password myself. The app returned an error message stating that my e-mail address was invalid. I tried setting up the account again. See step 1. Repeat.

At least Equifax appears to have learned from its previous mistakes regarding consumer credit control. The terms of service promise, "Your ability to lock or unlock your Equifax credit report for free will not change, nor will we ever add an arbitration provision to this Agreement."