Excessive Mobile Data usage after iOS 9 update - System Services - General

Do you have a Mac? If so, have you tried logging out of iCloud on the Mac to see whether that helps?

I definitely think I'm onto something with iCloud on the Mac causing the problem:

At 10:13 p.m. Friday evening (5/20/16), I logged out of iCloud on my MacBook Pro and reset the cell data usage statistics on the iPad. I then went to sleep, leaving my MacBook Pro turned on and awake (but still logged out of iCloud). At 6:32 a.m. Saturday, the iPad was showing absolutely no data usage whatsoever (0 bytes). I continued to leave the MacBook Pro logged out of iCloud but turned on and awake throughout the day yesterday. By 10:18 p.m.—24 hours after logging out of iCloud on the MBP—total cell data use on the iPad was only 13.4MB. Of that amount, 6.2MB was System Services and 2.5MB was Documents & Sync.

At 10:18 p.m. Saturday, I logged back into iCloud on the MBP and left it on (awake) overnight. By 7:34 this morning—less than 12 hours later—data usage on the iPad jumped to 127MB total, 119MB System Services, and 107MB Documents & Sync.

In looking at the iCloud control panel on the MBP, all iCloud services are currently turned on except that Photos only has My Photo Stream and iCloud Photo Sharing turned on; it does not have iCloud Photo Library enabled. The reason is that I have a very large photo library, and when I turned off iCloud services on Friday, the MBP retained the entire Photos library (with all original photos). When I enabled iCloud last night, I received a message that said, “Your full-resolution photos and videos stored n iCloud will not fit on this Mac.” Thus, I will wait until later to mess with re-syncing the Photos library that is on the cloud with the the library stored locally on my MacBook Pro.

My plan now is to start methodically turning off iCloud services on the MBP one-by-one to see whether I can narrow down the issue to a particular service. At 8:30 a.m. today, I am turned off all iCloud Drive services in the iCloud control panel. When I click the Options button next to iCloud Drive, I see a listing of the following apps that are using iCloud Drive:

• Automator
• Preview
• QuickTime Player
• Script Editor
• TextEdit
• Photos Agent
• iBooks
• iMovie
• Keynote
• Numbers
• Pages
• Mail
• Snapheal

Thus, I’ll be turning off all those items. If data usage goes back to normal, I’ll start turning on those apps/services one-by-one. If data usage does not go back to normal, I’ll next try turning off the Photos services, and then just continue down the line.

Hi.. I too had this problem with my iphone.. each time when i turn on and off my cellular data the data gets consumed hugely.. After reading all the threads here, saw my phone was too consuming in the "General" section of "system services"..

Suddenly i switched to wifi and checked for IOS updates.. which then i found an update was available.. I updated the iphone.. Now i'm not having any issues with cellular datas..

Maybe you too all try this.. The problem was with the IOS update..

One of the troubleshooting steps I've already taken was to complete erase my iPad, restore it to factory defaults, and reinstall the iOS (using the most current version) in recovery mode. That didn't help. For the past month or so, I've been running the iPad with no third party apps and the latest version of the iOS. At this point, all that has stopped the data bleed is either sleeping my MacBook Pro or logging out of my iCloud account on the MacBook Pro. Interestingly, I've also go an iMac logged into my iCloud account, but that computer seems to have no impact on my iPad's (or iPhone's) data usage. My next step is going to be to create a new user account on the MacBook Pro and, using that new account, log into my iCloud account and seeing whether that resolves the data bleed issue.

After over one month of troubleshooting, I finally discovered the solution for this vexing and annoying problem. As a I suspected, the problem was with one or more files on my MacBook Pro. The solution was to reset the permissions on all the files in my Home folder on the MBP by following these instructions. I strongly recommend that anyone who is experiencing high data usage on an iOS device and who also has a Mac of some type try resetting permissions on the Mac. Please let me know whether this solution works for you.

A one year old problem that is so serious that it can block people completely from accessing important sites, and the problem is still not solved. What on earth is Apple doing?

The only safe solution seems to be to disable all mobile data, and only enable it briefly when you need to read a mail or so.

Hi max , I have problem with iPhone 6 mobile data drain automatically while not use any app I look which app took more MB main problem is system service and General took lots of MB I don't know why please can you fix this problem

I waiting for your reply

Thanks suresh

Having this same problem with the 10.3 update. Haven't been able to identify the cause but I'm going to try turning off iCloud Drive, which is unfortunate since I actually like using it.

Facing the same problem till past some days but now tried too much and turned off the iCloud, so finally the data uses came down the graph, Hope this will help...

Did you ever get a solution for this?

Did anything help get this resolved for you?

WiFi assist is a big data hog. It has cost me $60 before I realized it was on by default.