Dark mode is stuck on

My wife had this exact issue. She could not deselect dark mode, and it was behaving differently than it did on my IPhone 7.

She found that for her under Accessibility, Display & Test Size, Smart Invert was turned on for some reason.

Turned it off.

Problem Solved. Dark mode now looks like it does on my 7 and she can turn it off and on.

:-) don‘t ask, I thought I could use this feature as a dark mode replacement years ago (but it’s useless) And today I remembered the shortcut... I had used it by accident and stuck in a defect dark mode the whole day. It is super stupid that you cannot switch back to the light mode when the invert is on...

Go to Settings>Accessibility>Display and Text Size, and disable the Classic Invert option. You should then find you can switch between light and dark mode 👍

Same issue, iPhone 8 Plus with iOS 13.2. Like Audioadren said below, Smart Invert was on for me as well (relic setting from an older iPhone I think), so I turned that off. That didn't fix it for me though. What did fix it was toggling "True Tone" off (I had it enabled) and on again. Bugs: gotta love 'em!

Same for me. Exact same....all of a sudden this morning the phone is in dark mode. However, triple clicking the right side button did nothing for me except pull up the emergency SOS screen. Yikes. I haven't seen anything here yet hat has helped. I do NOT have "automatic" selected for dark mode. In display settings, I am not even ABLE to click on "Light Mode". In my Accessibility settings, I *did* see there was some weird option checked about the "triple click".......but this was for the *homescreen* button, not the right side button. Ugh! Help! Smiley face emoji's look like jet black orbs with glowing neon eyes.

go to settings>general>reset>and reset all settings.

Try the tripple click in the sidebutton to switch the ‚old‘ dark mode off. helped me ;-)

When you go to settings>display & brightness, do you have automatic turned on or off?

this does not even make sense.

bugs never make any sense

No, what does not make sense is how could you possibly know that they had accessibility turned on and that they had assigned a three click to toggle it? that is way too much information to guess.

Triple click worked great on my Xs

Had the exact same problem. This worked! Thank you prettyoptimisticforapessimist!!!