iOS Alarm Bug Keeps Users Snoozing Through New Year's Weekend

If you currently have iOS 4 installed on your iPhone/iPod/iPad, and you rely on the device as an alarm clock, you may have caught a few unanticipated Z’s this weekend. What some users are already calling “Alarmgate” caused any non-recurring alarms set in the Clock app to fail between January 1st and 2nd of this year. While this inadvertently afforded some users (i.e. moi) the opportunity to gently roust from a late New Year’s Eve, not all users were as lucky. Throughout the day Saturday, I heard from friends and family who had arrived late to work, and even missed flights due to the glitch.

While one could say “You shouldn’t rely on your phone to wake you up” it’s easy to make this claim in retrospect. Given the prevalence of iOS devices, this bug is comparable to traditional alarm clocks failing for hundreds of thousands of people worldwide at once. It may be a little too easy to throw Apple under the bus, but there isn’t really an excuse for sloppy coding. Maybe the developers felt a Y2K-esque revival was in order as we entered the new decade. Regardless, it is strange Apple didn’t examine the code more thoroughly after the daylight savings issue.

Apple has officially acknowledged the issue, and claims that the bug has resolved itself as of this morning (Jan 3rd.) While alarms functioned fine for many, there are still reports floating about that some users unintentionally played hooky from the office. There is currently no word whether Apple will officially patch the issue in an upcoming software update, but it is likely the code will be re-evaluated. At the very least, this debacle might snag us a glimpse inside Apple’s multi-million dollar alarm clock testing facility.

If your device is still affected, you can attempt to resolve it by setting any non-recurring alarms to recurring for the time being. It also might be a good idea to dig up that old clock radio for a back-up alarm.