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If your iPhone alarm has gone quiet, Apple says it’s working on a fix

If your iPhone alarm has gone quiet, Apple says it’s working on a fix

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The company told the Today show it’s aware of the issue.

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An iPhone, horizontal on a MagSafe charger dock, in StandBy mode, with an analog-looking clockface
Image: Apple

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

It’s not clear how widespread the problem is. If you’re going through it, though, it wouldn’t be the worst idea to check a couple of your settings. One is to make sure that the ringtone and alerts volume slider under Settings > Sound & Haptics is turned up. It can be easy to accidentally turn down your alarm’s volume if you have “Change with Buttons” toggled on beneath that, so you might consider turning that off.

If that doesn’t work, some on TikTok say turning off the “Attention Aware Features” toggle under Settings > Face ID & Passcode helps. This setting does things like let you expand notifications with your screen locked, but it can also immediately turn your alarm way down if you look at your screen while it’s going off. That could be an issue if you sleep with your phone facing you on a stand and you open your eyes without fully waking up. (Although the TikToker above later posted that this fix stopped working when she updated her phone and that Apple Support recommended the Sound & Haptics fix.)

This obviously isn’t great for those of us who prefer the convenience and relative pleasantness of smartphone alarms versus the synthetic shriek of a traditional clock or the bad speakers and interfaces of most music alarm clocks.

Apple did not respond to The Verge’s request for comment by press time. Broken iPhone alarms are nothing new for iOS — see this Verge article from 2015 about Apple releasing an update to fix its alarms, among other things — and they happen on other devices, too. But it also feels like one of the most fundamental betrayals your smartphone can carry out.