iPhone alarm sound not playing on iOS 26

Glad I found this this morning. This has happened to me ever since I updated my phone. I’m a button snoozer so literally every morning I’ll press the side button to snooze out of force of habit. I’ve woken up an hour late three times now and the alarm screen is just sitting open with the option to snooze. I really hope Apple brings back the snooze toggle with side buttons.

Seeing this issue as well. Never had a problem with the alarm until iOS 26. Woke up late on my own to my phone showing the options to snooze or stop the alarm. I have an iPhone 14 Pro and Watch Ultra 3. The watch was also showing the same snooze or stop options but completely silent and no haptic taps either. I don’t know what I did to completely silence the alarm instead of snoozing it. This should be reverted to the previous behavior which didn’t lead to this state of a muted active alarm which is pretty useless.

Same. Ever since I upgraded (a day after 26.0 came out), my morning alarm mostly doesn’t work. Sometimes it has the sound, a loud one, sometimes it doesn’t at all. There is nothing I noticed that could help unfortunately. Never was late to work and now I am regularly late. Wish I could revert back to 18.7 but they removed this backup to this version. That is terrible.

This was happening to me too. I had to go in settings, sounds and haptics, and turn the sound up. The update turns the sound completely down. Now it works like it used to. My phone is still on silent no sounds for texts and calls but my alarm now makes sound.

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!!

Happening to me too, but can't confirm if it's just alarm sound, or any other sound. I realised this was buggy due to my lock sound disappear even switching it off/on in settings.

Disabling Attention Aware Features and reenabling it back brings my lock screen sound back.

It seems to be limited to while you’re looking at the phone. It’s either extremely low or doesn’t play at all. I also turned it back on to verify, and I continued to look at the phone, even if I wasn’t on a particular screen as long as the screen itself wasn’t locked the alarm doesn’t play

It’s a bug that definitely Apple needs to look at or disassociate the alarms entirely from the setting

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]

I have a very similar situation, before the iOS 26 update I would use my phone to play ambience tracks at low volume on a Bluetooth speaker, then the alarm would play on my phone at a higher volume with different tracks rather than Apple default ringtones. iOS 26 forced me to change my sleep routine temporarily, I rather switch to Android to continue my routine rather than continue with this option. I just fully reset my phone, hoping to resolve the problem, but the issue remains. I am thankful I tested the alarms immediately after the update, so I was not surprised the following day. Always test devices immediately after an update, never know what issues will occur.

I will tell you what is on my mind.

I go into haptics. Make sure volume is quite loud. Go into alarm and edit alarm and check the type and use default and it plays - it is also quite loud.

set alarm.

wait for alarm.

alarm goes off at a less than loud level and then immediately in the second sequence of the ringtone goes even quieter.

focus is set to work during this test.

it simply does not work as advertised so be aware until it works again.

almost missed a rental pickup which would have cost a late penalty so not happy at all.

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).

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.

Alarm still not going off with any volume. Today I had hopes that it would play after the 12 minutes like it did yesterday, but today my 5:30am alarm was still “going off” meaning that the screen said that some sort of alarm should be happening, and i didn’t get out of bed and see it until 6:45am. I guess i better go into some of the settings you guys have mentioned and figure out what is going on. Ridiculous. There shouldn’t be a “silent” alarm.

I just found that since “Alarms” is an app, Notifications are also SILENCED in “Sleep Focus”. Pretty terrible design. Sleep Focus used to turn off automatically when the Scheduled alarm is turned OFF. Not when it goes off. Snoozing keeps you in Sleep Focus, which explains some peoples’ issues. I moved the “Alarms” app to “Allowed” and it actually makes sound now. This doesn't fix it when you’re not using a focus or schedule, but it says I have no Focus profiles. So if you use the “Schedule” option for wake up alarms in Health or Sleep Settings, then you automatically have a Sleep Focus, and you have to allow access to Alarms Notifications. For those who use regular alarms, and also DND, you’ll need to allow notifications for the Alarms app while in DND. If it works some days and not others, you probably have a Focus Profile and/or Sleep Schedule programmed, whether you know it or not. Worth checking it out. I updated to ios26 2 months ago, but it just became an issue for me 3 days ago.