Initially, she thought her medication change and high stress levels were the culprits. However, the issue persisted beyond these factors.
To her 71,600 TikTok followers, Betsy shared that it was unusual for her, as she’s typically a light sleeper, even while on strong sleeping pills.
She discovered that the real issue was an iOS glitch affecting many iPhone users.
Alongside Betsy, people on Reddit also reported their alarms not sounding, even when set correctly.
According to these accounts, the alarm would visually go off but remain silent.
One frustrated user addressed Apple directly in a forum: “It causes alarms to silence, and silence from then on, if you groggily pick up and look at your phone while it is going off. This is an atrocious bug/feature.”
This problem seems related to an iOS 17 bug and the ‘Attention Aware’ feature in iPhones.
This feature recognizes when you’re using or looking at the screen, thus it doesn’t need to sound the alarm loudly to grab your attention.
Betsy offered guidance on disabling this feature to help others avoid similar issues.
She instructed: “Go into settings, at the top search ‘Attention Aware features’ and toggle it off… Until there’s no green showing.”
She further explained: “Apparently with a new update, Apple decided it was cute […] to silence some notifications and turn down the volume on some things such as alarms.”
“If it thinks you’re on your phone, it doesn’t want to disturb you etcetera, it has decided to use its own discretion to decide not to put the alarm through.”
Betsy reassured those in the same predicament, saying, “So you’re not delusional, you’re not super tired and you’re all of a sudden not able to wake up from your alarms,” because “most likely they haven’t been the same volume they were previously or it’s not even ringing at all.”
Apple support mentions that the ‘Attention Aware’ feature is available on most iPhones from the iPhone X onwards, as well as on the iPad Pro 11-inch, 12.9-inch, and 13-inch models.
The company explains that this setting lowers alert volume and prevents the display from dimming when the device senses the user’s gaze.