Alarms set on your iPhones didn’t ring this morning? You are not alone

Today Show called me last night and said iPhone alarms aren't working! I hadn't heard that but Apple confirmed this AM that it is aware of an issue causing some alarms not play a sound and that it's working on a fix.

My iPhone alarm woke me up right on time at 6:50AM! Anyone out…

— Joanna Stern (@JoannaStern) April 30, 2024

According to numerous posts on forums like Reddit, people are waking up late because their alarms aren’t ringing on time. The issue appears to be related to the Clock app on the iPhone. The alarms are automatically turning silent or muted and in turn failing to wake users. As a lot of people depend on alarms to wake up in the morning, this specific bug has created a lot of chaos among iPhone users.

While Apple hasn’t revealed the exact cause of this issue, several short videos on platforms like Instagram and TikTok suggested that this bug is triggered by the “attention awareness” feature on the iPhone.

This feature alters the device’s behaviour based on whether the user is actively engaged with the phone such as lowering the volume of alerts and not dimming the display brightness.

The attention awareness feature is enabled by default on iPhones but can be manually turned off. However, doing so means the iPhone won’t offer some of the aforementioned features. It’s also uncertain if disabling this feature will resolve the alarm issue.

Until Apple releases a fix, consider setting alarms on an Android phone, or to be on the safer side, use an old-school alarm clock. That one is unlikely to silence itself unless it runs out of battery.