iPhone alarm is silent randomly

My alarm doesn’t go off on my iPhone 8 Plus .It worked two weeks ago but now, nothing!

I have resolved this issue for me at least by following these steps:

1. Go to Settings/Sounds
2. Ringer and Alerts was set to zero volume, Change with Buttons disabled
3. Not sure how this happened but it meant that no sound would come out on any Alerts or Alarms. And setting the volume to maximum would have no affect
4. Set the volume to the level you want - you can leave Change with Buttons as disabled (which is useful because the volume of Alarms can remain quite loud even if your volume is down low the night before).

This issue first appeared for me with an iphone 5 C a few years ago (maybe 2014?). I gave up and switched to a 3rd party app which is OK. When I first reported it the apple store swapped out the handset but it happened again immediately. I have just had a go this week with 'bedtime' feature thinking it looked quite good and thinking 'surely the silent alarm bug can't be a thing anymore...' well unfortunately it is!! 3 days in and I wake up later than planned with stop/snooze displayed on the screen with no sound. Back to a standard alarm clock for me! Shocked that this is still an issue.

I have had the "displayed, -- but silent" alarm issue many times over many years, and I agree the thread answers about mute buttons and volume settings are very frustrating. I do not have a Home button on my latest phone, and the problem still happens. Apple has told me to back up the phone to the cloud, and reset to factory settings. But I have yet to try this solution because I believe I will lose a few things permanently, and I have been using a physical alarm clock instead for now.

theothelogian wrote:

I am really discouraged to see this problem has been going on for two years and Apple doesn't hasn't fixed it yet. PLEASE GIVE THIS YOUR ATTENTION, APPLE!!! We need a reliable alarm clock!

As has been explained repeatedly in this thread, Apple isn't reading here. If you want Apple to know about the problem, either contact Customer Service or submit feedback.

Product Feedback - Apple

Hi there, I’ve had this same problem on my iPhone XS for a while and finally found the solution. Go to your setting — Face ID and passcodes — turn off Attention Aware Features. I had this on before and according to the Apple Store staff, your camera may be scanning for a face when the alarm goes off and therefore automatically turn the sound off. I’ve had no problems since then (a week ago) with the alarm, fingers crossed it will stay this way. Hope this helps.

RCBalon wrote:

Close all apps before you sleep. This was my fix. Zero problems with alarm since I started doing this a couple months ago.

Why would I do that? I've had zero problems with my alarm ever.

13.1.3 has been released and I am downloading it now. I backed up my phone and then used the restore iphone function which will erase and then install the latest ios. hopefully i can restore my backup and the proble will be fixed.

MattSmith2020 wrote:

Same problem here APPLE WHEN WILL YOU ADDRESS THIS ISSUE? Alarm sounds once and then silences itself! *** this is one of many bugs I’m finding with the new iOS 13!

As people have been reporting this problem for years, it's unlikely that it's an iOS 13 issue. Apple isn't going to do anything about your problem unless you tell them you have one. To do that, you need to contact them directly.

Genius Bar Reservation and Apple Support Options - Apple

This is not one simple problem. It's a symptom with a number of different causes, each affecting a small number of people. This makes it very, very hard to diagnose.

I thought I would share a workaround with everyone. It has so far prevented this issue (knock on wood).

When I’m heading to bed and I plug my phone in, I wait to hear the chirp indicating the phone is charging. If I don’t hear an audible chirp, I check to make sure I have unmuted the phone. If it is not muted and still won’t chirp, I then check to make sure the sound isn’t manually set all the way down.

If I check both of these and it STILL won’t chirp, I turn the phone off and then back on and start again. Every time I’ve done this, the phone will chirp when plugged in during step 1, and I’ve not had the alarm fail on me since.

I should mention that I’ve had to restart the phone to get system audio working in this way perhaps 1 out of every 20 times (this is a huge guess - it’s happened, and more than once, but I wasn’t explicitly tracking the incidents). That’s about how often the alarm would fail me. I’ll also say that it hasn’t happened since upgrading to iOS 13, but I still do it every night because I have no reason to trust Apple on this one.

I’m confident that the times I had to restart are the times when the alarm would have failed me - if you’re still having the issue, try this out. Hope it helps!

I just had it happen again as I was watching a video on Facebook. It seems the sound drivers get corrupted and this affects any app or function that uses the main speakers. A reboot is not 100% successful at resetting the issue. We need a root cause. 13.1.3 called out the resolution of an issue with sound. Apparently it wasn't THIS issue.

My phone does the same thing I have MANY alarms just to be sure I won’t be late to any of my commitments but lately I’ve slept passed each of these alarms because I’ll go to turn off one alarm that lets me know it’s around the time I need to get up then I’ll lay back down because I know I still have sometime since I know I set all my alarms, but my phone won’t ring again. If I do wake up before the ring it’ll be a soft ring like I lowered the volume all the way down even if I check the settings where it says the volume is al the way up. Also my DND comes on randomly when its not even cut on in my settings so I have to constantly check to make sure I’m not missing any important events which is very inconvenient for me. My watch also does it my Apple Watch will vibrate and ring for like 2 seconds then will either stop ringing and just flash the alarm it won’t vibrate anymore or ring. It sucks I'm not able to rely on any of my Apple products someone please fix this!

dbe133 wrote:

HOW TO FIX IT: finally got mine to work after months of struggling with these issues. Go to settings>accessibility>voice control>attention aware and make sure that the attention aware feature is OFF. This has finally made my alarm consistently work, I hope it will help some of you.

Given that the person you replied to posted back in mid 2017, there's a very good chance they didn't have a phone with Attention Awareness. Yes, this is an answer for some people. But ,it's not the only thing that causes this symptom.

And, of course, this solution has been mentioned a number of times already in this very thread.

andyislateforwork wrote:

I haven't read the complete thread but I've just registred to let you know that the exact same thing happened to me now as well.

As Apple isn't reading here for suggestions or bug reports, that really doesn't do much. Use the Feedback page, call Apple Support or make appointment at the Genius bar. All of those will get the problem logged.

Product Feedback - Apple

I just figured out that each time I set another alarm time it defaults to a quiet level and I have to manually set the ringer level each time. So if I ask Siri to do it the alarm is too quiet. Seems weird. I have no idea how to set a default alarm level. If anyone knows,,,