iPhone alarm sound not playing on iOS 26

Same here, updated last thursday and alarms are hit or miss. Sometimes they sound, sometimes they don't. I rely on alarms and use an automation to schedule them to sound before all my meetings so I don't work through them and now I can't trust or rely on my alarms. It's so annoying!!

Didn’t update to the latest version yet, but turned off Attention Aware features in face id and password settings and it seems to work now. I still always check if I have silent mode off but it seems fixed now.

Same issue here. My alarm has intermittently failed to make a sound over the past couple of days. This only started occurring after updating to iOS 26.

iPhone 13 Pro

Example of my settings shown below.

[Edited by Moderator]

This is my problem exactly! I sleep with a Bluetooth sleep mask/headphones (at a very low volume) and my alarm USED to sound on my phone at full volume regardless of what I was playing. NOW it will only play on my headphones at the super low volume and it’s not enough to wake me up! This is a HUGE shift in how the alarm functions and needs to be restored to the original functionality please! I can’t imagine this isn’t impacting more people!

Has this consistently worked?

my issue is I have the same routine every night. Phone goes on a stand charger and I sleep with my watch on.

my watch vibrates to be my alarm.

twice now since ios26, I’ve had the issue stated here if the alarm screen (big snooze and dismiss buttons) but no alarm. Every other morning it’s worked fine.

Come on, Apple! My alarm would flash light every other day, but not everyday like it used to. I don’t know what to do anymore. I’ve tried everything suggested on this thread, and can’t seem to find anything on other site.

My issue is that when I am listening to something with AirPods (gen 1) AND with the Ringer/Alerts set to as low as it will go, the phone itself blares my alarm at top volume. Trying to turn it down with the vol buttons in the moment, of course, snoozes the alarm. Replicate:

• Set an alarm.
• Put on AirPods, turn vol up to the middle or so
• Alarm goes off at that volume, not at the volume at which the alarms setting is set (previous behavior). The sound playing through AirPods does pause (previous behavior).

Subject: Critical iOS Alarm Failure — Loss of Business and Trust

Same here. iOS 26.0.1.

I can’t say I’ve ever been this frustrated or encountered such a failure before. This issue has not only cost us financially but has also damaged our professional reputation.

My partner and I run a medical practice from home. We work long hours serving our community, and this afternoon we both relied on our 3:00 pm alarms to wake from a short rest between clients. Neither alarm went off. We overslept by an hour, arriving thirty minutes late for an important client consultation. We had to reimburse the client and have now lost credibility we’ve worked years to build.

To be frank, I’ve lost trust in Apple. Our entire professional and personal ecosystem runs on Apple — from iPhones, iPads, and Macs to Apple TVs used for client x-ray reviews. I’ve tolerated the growing instability of iOS over the past few years, but a fundamental alarm failure — a problem that feels straight out of 2010 — is unacceptable in 2025.

This isn’t a minor inconvenience. Our alarms are essential to how we run our lives and our business. They structure our 4:30 am starts, client reminders, report preparation, medication schedules, and even basic tasks like timing meals or ending a therapy session. The reliability of iOS alarms has been a cornerstone of our time management — and that reliability is now gone.

This experience has introduced a constant background anxiety where there was once trust. A basic system function that used to quietly support our work now demands constant doubt and double-checking.

I expect Apple to treat this as the serious regression it is.

Cheers,

Tom

I’m on iOS26.1. Along with the described issues here, my alarm behaved weird this morning while scrolling on a social media (can’t remember which one). My alarm messed up with the sounds. It started silent, the social media sound broke through, I opened the alarm app to stop it, and it went with a strange sound, not the one I chose. And this sequence of haptic silent alarm with social media sound breaking through happened several times until I stopped the alarm.

Yep!! Amazing how they could screw something up as easy as an alarm to the point it was actually a national news story. It’s hit or miss with me, same thing…. You can see the alarm going off but no sound.

It’s November and this issue is still happening! I keep trying all the fixes that I find and nothing had worked so far! I have a 14 plus and the alarm volume is ridiculously low.

if I didn’t have an Apple Watch and a Mac I’d be eying an android phone.

You know, right behind the ability to call 911 for help, having a dependable alarm is probably the most important thing that you can't screw up on the iPhone. Apple is doing this is a major way and whoever the Product Manager is for this part of the product needs to pay attention. The answer is pretty simple.

Have a dedicated sound and volume for just the clock/alarm app. No one in the world ever....EVER....wants to go into their clock app, set an alarm, and have it sit there for hours in the morning looking at them silently while not making a noise. No other volume or setting should affect the alarm that people need to be able to trust to wake up in the morning. You're screwing with people's lives here and if you don't fix it, it will cause them to lose trust in their iPhone. This has happened to me twice now, all on 26 and just today on the 26.01 update.

Just fix it. It's simple. You don't have to complicate it. Give the alarm/clock it's own volume setting that can be handled right in the app and have no other setting or volume control affect it. That way when I look at my phone at night, I can clearly see that the alarm is set and the volume is set where I know it will work.

I also updated to iOS 26 last Friday. My alarm didn't go off on Saturday morning, so I almost missed my business trip flight. It was terrible. I hope this issue gets fixed soon.

That’s so sad to hear. I hope it’s sorted now.

Same. If you apple guys changed the behavior of volume buttons during alarm on purpose, it belongs to the hall of fame.