Hi everyone,
I wanted to update and share my experience and some small testing I’ve done regarding the SIM lock issue that occurs overnight on iPhones running iOS 26.
- I confirm that my phone does not restart overnight — Face ID works immediately in the morning, which means the device hasn’t rebooted. Yet, I’m still prompted to enter the SIM PIN.
- I disabled my physical SIM (work number) and kept only my eSIM active (same carrier), and the issue still occurred. So it’s not related to dual SIM usage or physical SIMs.
- I reported the issue to Apple in late September and to my carrier, but I’ve received no response from either.
I’ve noticed something else:
I sometimes wake up during the night and check my phone, and I’ve started to get the impression that the SIM lock happens around midnight. It’s not exact, but the cutoff seems to occur sometime between 00:00 and 01:00.
This might suggest a scheduled background process or security check in iOS 26 that’s triggering the SIM lock — possibly tied to sleep mode, network handshakes, or even Focus profiles.
Even though the eSIM appears to be the trigger, the fact that your physical SIM also gets locked suggests that:
- iOS may apply SIM security policies globally, not per SIM. So if one SIM (e.g. eSIM) enters a locked state, the system might enforce a lock on all active SIMs — regardless of type.
- There could be a shared SIM management process that resets or reinitializes both SIMs during sleep. iOS treats both SIMs as part of a unified security context, and when one fails, the other gets pulled in.
After my son tried to call me at 1am due to a car issue and couldn’t reach me because my SIM was locked, I decided to disable the PIN on my eSIM.
Since then — no more SIM lock issues overnight (knock on wood :-).
If staying reachable at night is important to you and you’re okay with disabling your SIM PIN, this might be a workaround worth trying.
Thanks to everyone who’s contributed so far — let’s keep pushing for a fix.
