What does "notifications silenced" mean in Messages?

I am having this issue. My boyfriend continues to tell me that my notifications are silenced when I’m getting all of his messages. So this seems to be a continuous issue but how do we fix it because I’m getting annoyed with the messages from people asking me why I’m keeping my phone silenced.

I went as far as to turn off the status that is supposed to alert everyone when it’s silenced and they’re still seeing it’s silenced. I only have my do not disturb while I sleep. I’ve tried turning each one on then off, restarting my phone with up, down and power hold, I’ve even tried removing the set time on there to see if that would stop it but nothing I’ve tried has worked.

My son just got his Apple Watch set up. Whenever I text him, it states “notifications silenced” yet all DND is off. My wife texts him at the same number and it doesn’t say “notifications silenced” for her. It appears to be a glitch and I am awaiting a fix.

This is definitely still an issue. I have done the following:

Turned off Share across devices under focus mode on my phone and macbook

Removed all focus modes on both devices except the default DND and Driving on the phone (both are turned off)

Deleted my sleep schedule so it won't trigger DND automatically

Restarted the phone and laptop multiple times

After all of this the "notifications silenced" message still WILL NOT go away.

This is ridiculous!

I spent most of the day going back and forth with Apple Support on Twitter to no avail. This was their final response:

We understand your concern and appreciate the information you’ve provided. This issue is currently under investigation. We don’t yet completely understand the issue are unable to predict when the investigation will finish.

Last night I upgraded my phone to iOS 16. I really hoped that would fix the issue. It DID NOT! This is so frustrating, my clients keep asking about it. I don't know if my older phone model has anything to do with or not. I have an iPhone 8 plus.

This error actually caused me to miss my hospital calling me for my labor induction.. The hospital called and it went straight to voicemail. Even though Sleep, focus and DND were all turned off. NOT HAPPY.

Some may think this is a minor issue, but when your phone is integrated into your work life and your clients are asking why you have notifications silenced, it becomes a more urgent problem to fix. Fingers crossed, I was finally able to fix this bug, but I'm still not entirely sure what did the trick. In addition to everything mentioned in this thread I also did the following: I continued switching settings on and off, on both devices around focus settings and messages, restarting the phone several times, upgraded to iOS16, I then did a soft reset (volume up, volume down and holding the side button until apple logo appeared), One thing I noticed under the default DND that cannot be deleted, under >Turn on Automatically, even though the DND was off and nothing was added under, "Turn On Automatically" the "Share focus Status" under the schedule box was greyed out but there was a checked box. (On the phone, this was before I upgraded now the settings are different), but on my Macbook Pro I had to add a schedule, then I could uncheck that box and then remove the schedule again. See image below.

I also enabled Messages in iCloud on my laptop (which is a new model) and synced. I have no idea which of these things finally did the trick.

After all of this, a week of troubleshooting on my own and with Apple Support, I'm very hesitant to use any kind of focus mode going forward which is unfortunate as the only one I used was for my sleep schedule and it was very nice not to hear text dings while trying to sleep. I guess I'll go back to using the side silent mode switch at night.

I tried everything I could find to fix this. Finally I toggled mirror my iPhone off and on on my APPLE WATCH and power cycled. Problem solved. I can’t remember the last time I cycled the power on my watch, has to be the culprit.

RuthStevens wrote:

You might think Apple would reply….. crickets.

This is a user-to-user forum. Apple's participation here is limited to making sure we comply with the terms of use and to answering questions (in certain forums) that have received no responses in 12 hours.

Silencing notifications seems to be a bit pretentious. I say this because the few people who I have seen use this are very pretentious. If you don't want to be disturbed by your phone, turn it to silent.

So basically about a few weeks ago or two months ago or so, my friend I’ve been friends with for years now it’s saying blink blink has silenced notifications and I got kind of worried thinking I might not like me even though that’s not true even though I don’t feel close with me anymore, but then a few minutes ago or sooner it’s in the same thing but both times they came in and went away what’s this mean? I said it to a family friend too a year older thn/than me, but it went away it has only happened once, I didn’t really think much of it except yeah they silence notifications why what happened right now and then it’s happened again I thought the same thing someway I wasn’t answering but still I’m just confused is it them thinking do I want to silence the notifications or do I want to keep them open I still like this person or is it just like an accidental thing like a butt dial, or something when I accidentally clicked on it or silence notifications, or like something in your pocket

The only thing is, my wife and I know how to set and unset focus. With all of our devices having Do Not Disturb turned off and operating normally, we can still receive the message and can not find out what is "turned off" or "turned on" to make it happen.

My girlfriend just got a new phone and it says the same thing on my phone. I’m literally holding her phone in my hand and have scoured the settings. I can confirm she is not on Do Not Disturb nor am I on any special setting.

In my case (Monterey) this was a bug. My friend did not have Focus enabled and I was seeing it on my Mac but not my iPhone. Quitting Messages and fully restarting my MacBook Air caused this warning to go away and the bug to fix itself. I'm only guessing but it may be a data cacheing bug where she has Focus enabled at night and once it appears on my Mac is stays there regardless of her Focus status the next day when it automatically is turned off on her end (but that is not reflected on my end)

Ditto for my wife and I. I have however discovered that I can tell Siri to turn the "do not disturb" function off and it does so. This seems to be the only way to actually turn off focus on my end. Hope this helps.