Q: Mysterious random total shut downs following 3.1 update

I just sent my official feedback via the link in this previous post. I'm not sure what else we can do except flood Apple with this stuff until they respond or better yet, issue a freaking update.

guys can we all agree to complain thru ( http://www.apple.com/feedback/iphone.html until we get our fix? lets fight this til we win this nightmare. i have already reported this to cnn and fox news....we also need this spread out in the open so that apple could address the problem. "together we stand...divided we fall" apple just broke our hearts....

just read the article at
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/17/iphoneupdateproblems/ .....i think this is a start....im sure if we make more noise this will be picked up by more media outlets. as far as our problem is concerned i guess we just have to wait it out...but surely, apple didnt want to comment on it according to theregister.co.uk. i hope our small voices united as one would be soooo loud that apple would take care of us. oh by the way i couldnt help but laugh at one post in theregister.co.uk a lil ice breaker for this painful problem ---->


******** Posted Friday 18th September 2009 08:11 GMT
Need to brick your iPhone? #
There's an app for that!

Tried it, tried WiFi off, tried restore, tried bluetooth off.
None of the above work.

It does seem to coincide with warmer operating temperatures though.

I think its all about auto-lock feature. Everytime i set 1 minute auto-lock time - receive coma after one minute.

@corky1961 and to all affected iphone users... im going to complain again right now to apple. let our voices be heard...they cant ignore us...now that the press is slowly picking up.

Same problem here. I've noticed also that my phone gets warm and when I finally get it to respond after rebooting it (holding sleep/wake button and home button until the Apple symbol appears), the battery has been drained.

This all happened to me a convenient 3.5 weeks after my phone is no longer under warranty. I called Apple Care and they said there was nothing they could do because my phone is no longer under warranty. I'm telling all my friends to think twice before buying an iPhone.

OK, so I spoke with a product specialist. She was very kind and helpful. We're going to try this, and if it doesn't work, the phone will be exchanged and sent to Apple for autopsy.
Here's the advise she had:
Hello,
Rayne thought you might find this article useful. We hope it helps resolve your technical issue.
Update and restore alert messages on iPhone and iPod touch
Click on the link above or copy and paste the following address into your Web browser to view the article: <http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1275?viewlocale=en_US>
Best regards,
The Apple Support Team
------------
It's a link to the procedure referenced here before. Please be aware that you WILL loose some data. (text messages, WiFi settings, settings in general, bookmarks, camera roll, etc.)
You can SYNC (and therefore save: notes, contacts, media, mail, apps)

Here's what I've gathered:
It's a runaway process, not a shutdown. The phone is still on, and running SOMETHING, just unresponsive. This has the very _unfortunate side-effect_ of also rendering the crash-reporter useless. Thus, why Apple hasn't been more prompt in a solution. (Similar to the only way we got the baseband to generate a crash when it locked up on 1.1.2 was to switch Airplane Mode on and then off rather than reseting the phone.)

WiFi off may help, but isn't a solution. It still happens in phones with WiFi off.

Much to our disadvantage, the phone being locked up prevents debugging.

It may be thermally related. (this may also explain why WiFi and BT power may help but not solve the issue. More things off = less heat. iPhone 3G and 3GS use thermal management and may be throttling the processors down.

It appears to be timed near calls ending. (Again... thermal management?)

No crash or error logs are being generated with this behavior.

If you are calling in, please request to speak with a product specialist and cite this thread. It's obviously a firmware issue and no amount of replacing phones is going to fix it. (though, you may jump on the opportunity to get a new one. If they see a spike in replacement units I'm sure they'll listen more. I went through 3 with the baseband bug before they hooked me into someone "upstairs" and sent some crash logs in. A week later... 1.1.3!)

I'm having the same problem. Does not appear to be heat related in my case but does happen several times a day since the update and is only getting worse. Possibly a coincidence but I notice it happens most often when I've flipped the phone around and it's in the process of changing orientation.

I'm getting this too.

I have reinstalled 3.1 and there is no difference. 3.0 worked fine so I can say the problem is in 3.1. The only fix is to revert to 3.0 or wait for Apple.

Calling the phone would bring it back to life for a while, now a hard reset is the only way I've found to get the phone working again.

This is a mission critical bug for me as it makes the phone unusable.

I agree with corky1961 and other users that recommend sending official feedback. If we have time to converse among ourselves we also have time to drop a few lines to Apple. It does a greater impact if we flood there feedback form. Until then, the best solution is to rollback the firmware to 3.0. It is really easy to do.

One lesson I did learn is that I should wait to install any major updates; let others be the testers. That why I am still waiting to upgrade to Snow Leopard.

Another update: I've been posting about having the same problems many in this thread have encountered with their iPhones. I finally made an appointment with the Genius Bar at my local Apple store to try and resolve the issue. Like many others, at my appointment, they looked at my phone, hooked it up to diagnostic tools, and then promptly replaced my iPhone with a new one. The genius did however tell me that the problem with my particular phone (presumably what was causing my "comas,") dealt with a portion(s) of a mail application that is part of the OS. The resolution was somewhat less than appealing, since I could not recover much of the data from my 3.1 backup, but at least the new phone they gave me is functioning properly (with OS 3.0.1 presently).

I'm glad that your issue was resolved unfortunately not everyone is still under warranty. Still though congrats on your victory.

***? apples ghey, mine does this too

Just adding another "mine too" to this thread. Since the upgrade, I've had about 5 freezes. Really annoying when I look at the phone and realize that it is dead and I have no idea how long I've been unreachable. Makes me lose some of my confidence in using an Apple product for work.

Okay Folks - here is my story. I've had this problem since I upgraded to the 3.1 software. At first, I blamed it on the battery. I called Apple on Monday to discuss the issue and spoke with Veronica, a product specialist. I pointed her towards this thread and my description of the problem and eventually she said there was an issue that the engineers were aware of but were still seeking information. I advise I had installed the iPhone Configuration Utility in an attempt to collect a syslog at the time the problem occurred. Since then, I have been fortunate enough to capture 2 events' syslogs. I had an appointment at the 5th Ave apple store this evening in an attempt to return my phone to California for debugging (along with my logs) but Adam, the Tier 2 Genius Bar tech, declined to process the phone since the issue that was documented in my ticket "didn't exist" and "must be a software issue".

I agreed it was software but its pretty clear that there is a legitimate issue with the 3.1 update and certain varieties of 3G hardware. I volunteered my logs which were declined. We did a restore and I am not going to touch the phone till it has a problem again.

Long story short (too late), I recommend everyone who has this issue install the iPhone Configuration Utility and use it to save a log. The log rotates fast so if you happen to have your phone in a coma, plug it in immediately and grab the log as soon as the phone eventually starts to respond again. Once you save the log, lets see if we can find some commonalities.

From my two logs of the issue, I see two issues:
1) There are entries in the syslog that appear out of order.. ie. several lines of kernel debug nonsense about the AppleMBXDevice and AppleMRVL868x going to sleep and then 2 lines later, a kernel debug message from 4 seconds earlier indicating System Sleep.
2) When the phone "wakes up" there is a flood of syslog messages. Some of which are startling:
Tue Sep 15 19:48:59 unknown kernel[0] <Debug>: AppleSynopsysOTGCore::sleepWakeNotification: System Powering on
Tue Sep 15 19:48:59 unknown kernel[0] <Debug>: System Wake
Tue Sep 15 19:48:59 unknown kernel[0] <Debug>: + AppleMPVDDriver[0xc0b5c800]::setPowerStateGated()
Tue Sep 15 19:48:59 unknown kernel[0] <Debug>: AppleMBXDevice(0xc0bbc800)::setPowerState(1)
Tue Sep 15 19:48:59 unknown kernel[0] <Debug>: AppleMBXDevice(0xc0bbc800)::changePowerStateGated(1)
Tue Sep 15 19:48:59 unknown kernel[0] <Debug>: AppleMRVL868x::setPowerStateGated(): 0 -> 1, 0xc0c66800
Tue Sep 15 19:48:59 unknown kernel[0] <Debug>: AppleMRVL868x::wakeupSequence()
Tue Sep 15 19:48:59 unknown kernel[0] <Debug>: AppleS5L8900XSDIO::sendCommand(): CMD52 Failure - SDIO Cmd Timeout: arg(0x00000a00), error count(1), dsta register(0x0000c004)
Tue Sep 15 19:48:59 unknown kernel[0] <Debug>: AirPort: Enabled AppleMRVL868x (link 1, sys 0, user 0)
Tue Sep 15 19:48:59 unknown kernel[0] <Debug>: AppleMultitouchZ2SPI: enabled power, scheduled bootloading
Tue Sep 15 19:48:59 unknown kernel[0] <Debug>: AppleSerialMultiplexer: !! mux-ad(err)::validateAndGetMuxBsdInterface: Cannot perform Write on Channel 2 when state is Error
Tue Sep 15 19:48:59 unknown kernel[0] <Debug>: AppleSerialMultiplexer: !! mux-ad(err)::validateAndGetMuxBsdInterface: Cannot perform Read on Channel 11 when state is Error
Tue Sep 15 19:48:59 unknown kernel[0] <Debug>: AppleSerialMultiplexer: !! mux-ad(err)::validateAndGetMuxBsdInterface: Cannot perform Open on Channel 11 when state is Error
Tue Sep 15 19:48:59 unknown kernel[0] <Debug>: AppleSerialMultiplexer: !! mux-ad(err)::bsdIoctl: Fatal error code=kASMFatalErrorSPI(11)
Tue Sep 15 19:48:59 unknown kernel[0] <Debug>: AppleSynopsysOTGDevice::handleUSBReset

When the phone powers on, I do notice that there was no carrier signal and it appears it has to re-establish a connection to AT&T. It really looks like this hardware can fall into a state while in sleep mode that it takes 5 minutes to wake up (or the iPhone eventually resets the hardware).

If anyone is able to capture logs, please update this post. I am going to try to find an escalated contact at Apple who I can speak with about it because they certainly don't want to listen to me when I go through the proper support channels.