What does "notifications silenced" mean in Messages?

It’s a problem on my iPhone 8 Plus also. This Focus “feature” is a fiasco as far as I am concerned. It is unnecessarily confusing and, in my opinion, completely unnecessary. Apple needs to take care of this ASAP. It is causing major problems for many people.

I found that my friends saw that my notifications were silenced. However, I was still getting the messages. I had zero focus or DND features turned on. I simply went to the settings and turned off the feature to notify users when in focus mode. They no longer see the message now.

i had this feature turned on in hopes to notify if I was “at work” or “working out” and it did, but seems it remained on after these events. Maybe it wasn’t ready for prime time yet.

Apple please fix this, both my wife and I have this issue. She uses a 13 Pro max and I use a 12 Pro. I work in the information security world and she is a freelance writer… I’m telling you this to inform you both of us know how technology “works” and this is broke. Conversations are silenced for no rhyme or reason. This is broke.

Please fix!

I think I figured out why my do not disturb always comes on, but doesn't look like it's on in focus. On my iPhone I went to Settings, Focus, Do Not Disturb.....and at the bottom it said, "TURN ON AUTOMATICALLY 8-12AM Every Day. I clicked on that, and the next page had a schedule you can set for every day of the week, with a schedule on/off switch, and at the bottom was, "Delete Automation."

I had the same problem and the solution is just to ensure that

1. Setting -> Share Across Devices -> ON

2. Setting -> Do Not Disturb -> Focus Status -> On

Then you toggle On and Off Do Not Disturb, the "notifications silenced" message on your friend's phone should be off.

There is no need to go to every devices to check this as long as "Share Across Devices" on your phone (or mac) is ON, the status would be applied to all your devices with this settings ON as you toggle DND

If you want just the mac to disable all alerts permanently, on Mac System Preferences, turn OFF "Share Across Devices" and turn OFF "Share Focus Status" on Mac, then the settings on IOS would not affect the mac DND and the "notification silenced" message would not be shown.

Simply not true. I have all notifications on, I have deleted all my focus settings that I had set up and I am still being told by people that I have notifications turned off. I have rebooted multiple times, signed out of every device that I have and then back in and nothing has changed.

After having run into this and checking ALL of my devices to see that none are in any kind of focus mode, I found the solution...at least in my case.

In a recent iOS update, Apple again apparently reset the setting where iMessage/Messages can coordinate with the device's Focus setting. Re-enabling this resolved the issue for me. Here's how:

1. In the Settings app in iOS, scroll down to Messages and tap on it.
2. The top section is titled "ALLOW MESSAGES TO ACCESS" and the top entry is "Focus". Enable this so Messages can sync with the device's Focus setting.

Note that this must be done on the device where, at some point, you've changed the focus. I move my iPhone's focus setting to "Sleep" at night to silence notifications, and since updating iOS, with the slider above disabled, Messages just kept my inbound messages silenced even though I took the device back out of Sleep focus in the morning. Fixed now. :)

Good luck, hope this helps!

You will see the switch when you open the message, then tap the > next to the phone number/sender. One of your options then is Hide Alerts.

that happened to me as well so that means Molly probably doesnt want to receive anymore notifications from you so she cant get your messages.

Do not disturb

we have turned off EVERYTHING POSSIBLE connected to Focus, Do Not Disturb etc. - No dice. My wife’s phone STILL says her notifications are silenced. This is unacceptable.

DND = do not disturb

Not a chance this will help, I have one Apple device. The iPhone 13 with the problem. Had before and after I upgraded to 15.2

Do Not Disturb

This worked for me! Thank you for the help!