iphone 6 wifi greyed out, random restarts

I have wondered about the VPN as well, although it is set to 'off' unless I join an untrusted network. The most recent time the phone restarted and the wifi was disabled and greyed out, the phone hadn't been connected to a wifi network. The wifi button had been toggled on, but we were away from home so the phone wasn't on any wifi networks at the time. (We were out for a walk.) It might have been scanning for wifi networks, but it doesn't automatically join any unknown networks.

Something I have tried is disabling wifi networking in location services. I went to Settings-Privacy-Location Services, which I have set to 'on', and I do want it that way. Then in System Services, I toggled Wi-Fi Networking to off and restarted the phone. I did that yesterday, and so far I haven't had any issues since. Since this is a sporadic thing, it will take a while to evaluate the effectiveness of that solution.

Problem not solved. 😕 We were out for a walk, not connected to any wifi networks, and when we got home, I found that the phone had restarted and the wifi button was greyed out. A hard reset did not solve the problem this time. Resetting the network settings did.

I have uninstalled the VPN. Hard to diagnose a problem when it only happens sporadically and it occurs when the phone is not in use.

Is there such a thing as an app that could create crash reports for an iphone?

Thanks for your response. I was editing my post while you were replying, wondering if there is an app that would create a crash report for an iphone. It would be interesting to see what my phone was trying to do when the restart occurs. Of course, that would pinpoint the exact problem.

As for repairs, my phone is only a few months old, so I wouldn't be taking it to anyone other than an authorized service center. I have been in touch with Apple, and so far they want me to test software issues first. The diagnostics they ran didn't indicate any hardware issue.

And just as I was typing this, I tapped the home button on my phone and it promptly went to white screen with Apple logo.

Looks like the VPN wasn't the problem, and things may be more serious than I thought. The phone is taking a while to find the cell phone carrier. And sure enough, the wifi is disabled. The cellular data was set to on, and I had had it off, since I am not in my home country at the moment.

Just did a hard reset. Wifi still greyed out. Resetting network settings for the second time in 2 hours. Got the wifi back. I think I'll use what remains of this evening to back up my phone to iCloud. 😢

Well, so far Apple is going the reset route first. There hasn't been any mention of repairing or replacing the phone. We're in a city that has an Apple center, maybe it's best I just deal with them directly.

I'm wondering how this will go, since the phone was purchased in Canada through a Canadian cell phone provider, and I am in the U.S. at the moment. My Canadian cell provider did say their SIM card would work in an iphone they didn't issue provided that iphone was unlocked.

We could likely nurse this phone along until we return to Canada, but there, access to service for this phone is a drive of nearly 7 hours round trip, whereas here in the U.S., the nearest Genius Bar is about 20 minutes from where I am. I'm going to contact them tomorrow and see what we can do from here.

I just found this:

http://joecaiati.info/post/130542880175/digging-into-diagnostics-usage-data

I looked at my diagnostic logs, and the three restarts that I saw generated logs with the word "panic" in them. Looks like we've got a hardware thing. Will keep you posted...

Update:

Took the phone to Apple and they didn't find any hardware issues. A full restore was suggested, and I said I figured I could do that myself, having practiced the procedure with my old iPhone 5. Well, life got busy and I didn't get around to doing anything with the phone. It was working fine, and then this morning it crashed several times. I did a few hard restarts and network resets, then I decided to try resetting the phone by connecting to iTunes with my Windows PC.

When I did this, iTunes said the OS on my phone needed to be updated to iOS 9.2.1. I had already updated to 9.2.1 shortly after the update became available, and my phone had indicated that the software was up to date, so this surprised me. Instead of doing a restore, I backed up the phone and then installed 9.2.1 using iTunes. It looks like it may have been a corrupted installation of 9.2.1, done over wifi, that was causing the problems. I'll see how things go from here. It will be a while before I can feel that the issue is resolved, since sometimes days or even weeks go by without problems.

Well, here's the end of this saga: I ended up losing my wifi a couple of additional times. The first time it took more resets to get it back. Today, nothing I did would restore it, and the Bluetooth was gone as well. I restored the phone to factory specs using iTunes, and took it to a genius bar, where it was replaced. They said it was a hardware issue after all. I've restored the phone from a backup which had been generated in the middle of the night. I am concerned that only a part of my camera roll has been restored, and about 2/3 of it consists of blank spots. The phone says there are over 800 pictures there, but most of them are blank and the phone's usage settings reflect that very little data is being used up by photos.

I'll ask that in another thread, re how to get my pictures back to my phone.