Rude awakening: iPhone users say alarm clock app isn't working

It’s what nightmares are made of: Setting an alarm on your phone to wake up in the morning and it doesn’t go off. Some social media users say this is happening to them, and Apple has shared steps to make sure your iPhone's attention-aware settings are right for your needs. NBC’s Emilie Ikeda reports for TODAY.

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#iphone #alarm #technology

[albertosayas]

Who else ends up waking up before their alarm goes off? 😂

[aleksandrmiller]

I have my inner alarm clock, it’s called anxiety

[alisonfields]

A lot of people are pretending this is user error and acting like this isn’t actually an issue. This has happened to my phone multiple times over the years. The alarm is correctly set, the ringer and alarm volume are on and up, but I wake up hours later than the time set with my phone screen showing the snooze and stop buttons as if it’s going off, but it’s completely silent. No settings were changed prior to this happening each time.

[stevo-dxrr]

Yeah, I slept past a meeting on Tuesday because of this.

After I awoke, I edited my alarm to test it, and change the time to make it go off one minute later. It did go off, but only two rings, and then it stopped going off altogether. I reproduced that three or four more times, each time the alarm ringing 1-5 times before disabling itself. Then I tried the same experiment again after I got out of the shower, but instead it didn’t reproduce. Very weird.

[chad]

This been happening to me for years. Had me feeling crazy. Bought a simple alarm clock off Amazon cuz the iPhone isn’t reliable.

[tatersalad]

Luckily for me i always wake up before my alarm sounds.

[JackMustang]

This is why I have an “actual alarm clock” next to my bed.

[mikeybroski]

This is why I had a 2nd physical alarm as a failsafe in college.

[Kylelongwest]

This is what I afraid would happen. If it's an important day for me, I would set on both my tablet and my phone.

[BlindMango]

The bug has nothing to do with the Attention Awareness setting, which has been a setting for years now (do turn it off though as it does lower the volume of the alarm clock considerably if you look at the screen while the alarm goes off!). I do happen to know what the issue is though:

This bug even occurs if you have Attention Awareness turned off and occurs **whenever you set multiple alarms**, basically if you let the initial alarm ring and then don't press the Snooze button before the second alarm starts, that second alarm and any one past that will not make a sound whenever you finally hit the snooze button for the first one. It has happened for many months now and it has taken me months to figure it out because I'm always half asleep when it happens, I put in a ticket with Apple about a month or two about it though, good to hear they're working on it

[AcTua]

my cats wake me up at 5AM so I don't need anything

[ludicrousspeeds]

I thought I was going crazy. This happens about once per month for me.

[thenoahr]

My alarm never went off 😂 I woke up and it just never happened…

[LaoTzudonym]

I thought I was the only one experiencing this. Thankfully my echo dot's alarm wakes me up when this happens.

[riyahworld]

Yep this happened to me last year and it was strange because it NEVER happened before! I used to never turn mine off and it happened twice. I noticed it the first time but wasn’t sure. Then I was late for work the second 🤦🏽‍♀️

[LordBubbly]

This was an issue back iOS 16. I disabled attention awareness feature/setting when it first happened with me in iOS 16 and have never had an issue since

[JACOBMXYT]

My phone is face down the whole time and I sleep through the entire alarm while I wake up everyone else in my house 😂

[andyvaldez]

Android user here. I made it to work today on time 😀

[johnnyk]

I’ve had both Apple AND Alarmy fail the same morning, so now I also set my old-timey alarm clock 5 minutes after the other 2… and loud enough to make me literally jump out of bed since now I’m late already. Ahhh progress…

[Jawz_]

I know this isn’t related, but i have the iPhone 15 plus, and this phone has been a mess since it came out. Really unimpressed. My phone is having an awful time with connecting to the internet and to cellular, is super slow and buggy, and has had an 11% battery degradation since launch day and I have clean charging. This phone is riddled with issues.