Miss Your Alarm Lately? Reported iPhone Issue Could Be to Blame

Some iPhone users are experiencing their phones randomly shutting off in the middle of the night, requiring them to put in their passcodes in the morning and causing them to miss alarms.

The reports surfaced from a Reddit thread on Wednesday, in which one user says that they have used the Apple Health app’s sleep schedule feature for about three years, and until now have never had an issue. However, on this particular morning, the user says that they happened to wake up at 5 a.m. on their own, late for work, and noticed that the alarm screen was up with the snooze option on it, but their phone didn’t wake them up.

“I assumed that maybe I slept through my alarm, which is still odd, because it’s never happened,” they explained. But then, the user noticed that their son didn’t wake up at his usual time a couple of hours later.

“I hadn’t seen him milling around the house, so I knocked on his door, and there he was sleeping, and he said ‘I didn’t even hear my alarm,'” the user wrote. “I told him what happened to me and he held up his phone and it had the alarm screen on it like mine did.”

While it might have been easy enough to brush off one isolated incident, the thread quickly became flooded with other iPhone users who had experienced the same issue.

“Came directly to this sub to see if it was just me. My alarms also did not go off this morning,” shared one user. “Dude neither did mine. Wtf,” added another.

If you’re wondering if this happened to you, a couple others chimed in to suggest checking your iPhone’s battery by opening up the Settlings app. If there’s a gap in usage, that means your phone randomly shut off in the middle of the night.

According to 9to5Mac, the issue seems to be not just affecting new iPhone 15 models, which suggests that the it has something to do with the new iOS 17 update. Likewise, not all iOS 17 users are experiencing shutdowns, and it doesn’t appear to be happening nightly either.

Apple has yet to comment on the issue, but it seems like only a matter of time before the company installs an update to fix whatever bug could be causing the shutdowns. In the meantime, if you have an early morning meeting or flight to catch, we suggest using a backup alarm clock, just to be on the safe side.