If your iPhone alarm has gone silent, Apple says it’s working on a solution

Apple says it’s working to fix an issue that causes some iPhone owners’ alarms to go off silently. That’s it according to Today segment of the show this morning about the issue, which has been spreading on social media as users complain that their alarms are not waking them up. Vergecast producer Liam James told me he’s been having the same problem since Friday, with an alarm he set off “6 or 7 years ago” and hasn’t gone off since.

It’s unclear how widespread the problem is. If you’re experiencing this, it wouldn’t be the worst idea to check some of your settings. One is to make sure the ringer and alerts volume slider on Settings > Sound and haptics is increased. It can be easy to accidentally lower the alarm volume if the “Change with buttons” option is enabled beneath it, so you might consider turning it off.

If that doesn’t work, some on TikTok say to turn off the “Mindful Attention Features” button in Settings > Face ID & Passcode help. This setting lets you expand notifications with the screen locked, but it can also immediately turn off the alarm if you look at the screen while it’s off. This can be a problem if you sleep with your phone facing you on a stand and open your eyes without fully waking up. (Although the TikToker above posted later that this fix stopped working when she updated her phone and that Apple Support recommended the sound and touch fix.)

Obviously, this isn’t great for those of us who prefer the convenience and relative friendliness of smartphone alarms over the synthetic scream of a traditional clock or the poor speakers and interface of most musical alarm clocks.

Apple did not respond to On the edgerequest for comment to date. Broken iPhone alarms are nothing new for iOS – see this Border 2015 article about Apple releasing an update to fix its alarms, among other things – and this happens on other devices too. But it also feels like one of the most fundamental betrayals your smartphone can commit.