What does "notifications silenced" mean in Messages?

i fixed my wife’s (for the time being) and I THINK this is what finally did it:

settings

focus

Do not disturb

Add schedule or automation

(Add a “smart activation”)

Then delete the automation you just activated.

after I did that, (without even restarting) the “***** has notifications silenced” message WAS GONE! Halle-freaking-lujah

I’ve had the same issue as OP, my husband have NEVER used focus and yet it says his are silence…his notifications sounds are still working but on my end it says it’s silenced though he hasn’t silenced anything. We’ve checked everything and double checked .

Go to “Focus” by swiping up on your home screen. Click on the “Focus” button, then you will see this screen in the picture below. Choose a focus, then click “settings” at the bottom. You can see the “settings” under the Driving focus area in the picture below:

In Settings, first turn off Do Not Disturb, then also turn off the Focus Status.

You’ll need to shift the Share Focus Status from green to gray for it to be off.

Repeat this step for each Focus area as seen in the first picture. Hope this helps 🙂

recently had the same message pop up on my son’s phone, though no focus or DND was on it was still showing status message.

but easily turned off on his phone (see image).

under the DND setting (can dear for it in setting for quick access) just go in and turn off the option to share focus status. That way it won’t show up.

though when it is turned on, the recipient stills gets all messages, it just solves the actual notifications (like driving mode option.

anyways, hope this helps.

I don’t know if anybody still needs help with this issue. I found a way to eliminate the silenced notification message. After going to settings and turning off Focus on all the devices associated with my Apple ID, i kept on getting the same message. It wasn’t until I went to settings, scroll down to messages, and turned on (allow messages to access) Focus. I think this allowed messages to read my settings for Focus (which was at this point turned off).

My boyfriend just told me this popped up on his iphone. Nothing was turned on in Settings/Focus but under Settings/messages, I switched off "Allow messages access focus" and bam - it stopped. I switched it off on his ipad and they synced since he was not with me at the time. See screenshot

I found that the silence issue was in the screen of the persons name. Look at the names where you receive messages and you may see a bell with an “/“ through it.

Go in it and cut off hide alerts. Not sure how this got turned on but once it’s off messages should no longer be silence.

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.

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'm not a fan of this "focus" feature. As others have stated, to resolve this issue, go to settings in all apple devices to the "focus" feature. You'll see the option "Share across devices" and simply click on the slide button to turn this off. I then immediately checked my iMessages and the friend who had her "notifications silenced", no longer has them silenced. I don't understand this at all, but by ensuring my devices were no longer sharing "focus" status, I have resolved this issue.

I had the same problem, but I managed to figure that out what you have to do is go to settings, and then click on do not disturb and in that you must’ve turned on the every day schedule focused on, you will have to delete that and then go back to your message if it says the same notification saying it’s silent get out of your message turn off your phone turn it back on and you should have it gone. So when that day is in blue meaning it will say that the focus on that days is on so tap it, so yeah shows gray not blue and then go back to your message to see if it’s gone and if it’s still not gone turn off your cell phone and turn it back on and it should be gone. Hopefully this helps.

Sorry for my previous message it worked for a few minutes and then I had the same problem but I think I just figured it out 100% if you have a laptop check that do not disturb on your laptop your laptop I have a Mac air on the upper right there’s two buttons Top and bottom right next to the next to the search glass between Siri do you have a window like that and on the left-hand side you will have the do not disturb click on that and on the right there’s another do not disturb switch you where you can toggle left or right underneath that you have apps that that’s running through the on do not disturb. And on the bottom of that there’s a plus and a minus sign minus all of them and if you have anything under the do not disturb on the left, like personal smile, work delete it. also on the right hand side you should see options. Click on it and allow calls and text from everyone. I don’t know how this happened but I manage to get it undone. I hope this helps.

I realized that it means that their phone is on “do not disturb” which means that all of their notifications are silenced, no just messages from you.

See the response below.

I believe that in most vehicles, activating the apple carplay feature will also turn on focus mode on iPhones. I have experienced this issue with my partner (allegedly).