The iPhone seems to be sleeping on the job once more
It might not be “new year, new me” for the iPhone yet, as scattered reports across social media show that the iPhone is, yet again, failing to wake people up.
Nothing starts the day off on the wrong foot like missing your alarm when you’ve got somewhere to be or something to do. Unfortunately for some iPhone owners, that seems to be the exact situation they’ve found themselves in.
Stop us if you’ve heard this before. A quick check on X shows plenty of iPhone owners reporting that their alarms are not going off or are going off silently. A smaller subset of people are reporting that their alarms are going off at the incorrect time.
Why is my iphone alarm never going off recently what is this
— Skyler (@Airbenderjpg) January 22, 2025
It looks as though the problem began on or slightly before January 22. Prior to that, most of the complaints were about the iPhone alarm sound resetting to 100% loudness, and not the lack thereof.
That volume bug regularly affects one AppleInsider writer, while two others have had the silent treatment. There doesn’t appear to be a common link, though, and most AppleInsider staffers have not experienced any alarm problems — with our web developer being a notable exception.
Currently, Apple hasn’t acknowledged the problem or offered a fix, but we do know that this is far from the first time this bug has been reported. It was a problem in 2019, and then became a notable problem again in 2024.
As is typical, many users have reported that their alarms are going off, but are silent. For that reason, it’s always worth double-checking the volume settings on your iPhone.
- Open Settings
- Scroll down and tap Sounds and Haptics
- Slide the Ringtone and Alerts slider to an appropriate level
How to check the volume of your iPhone alarm
You may also want to toggle off Change with Buttons, as it may have accidentally become enabled at some point.
AppleInsider also suggests deleting and re-creating your alarms — especially those that you have set to repeat — for good measure. Also ensure that you haven’t accidentally bumped it to the wrong period, such as setting an alarm for 5:00 PM when you meant to set one for 5:00 AM.
You may also want to turn off Attention-Aware Features, should they be enabled. This was the workaround for the issue when it cropped up in 2024.
- Open Settings
- Tap Accessibility
- Tap on Face ID & Attention
- Toggle Attention-Aware Features off
Attention-Aware Features enable your iPhone to use Face ID to check whether or not you’re paying attention to your device and act accordingly. When enabled, your display will lower the volume of your alerts if you’re looking at your iPhone. Unfortunately, it seems that sometimes the feature persists, even when you are no longer looking at your iPhone.
