If you take even a cursory glance at TikTok from time to time, you might well have encountered the mysterious case of Angele Sofia, who has recently started documenting her struggles with an iPhone alarm that goes off at 9:25 am every morning, without fail, for seemingly no reason whatsoever.
What quickly started as a throwaway ask-for-help TikTok video has become a viral multi-part series with returning fans vested in her ongoing struggle. Sofia first took to TikTok on November 21 to reveal that she had “some sort of glitch or problem on my iPhone” that “no single Apple employee can seem to figure out.” She revealed that at 9:25 am every morning, an alarm goes off on her iPhone, despite the fact she never has one set.
“I do not have an alarm set at 9:25, nor have I ever had an alarm set at 9:25,” she says, revealing the problem started out of the blue one day, and that the issue has been bothering her for an astonishing four or five years. The alarm is strange in other ways, too, it doesn’t ring when the phone is silent and it can’t be snoozed. Perhaps strangest of all (or not at all strange, as we’ll get to) is that this iPhone has persisted each time she has bought a new iPhone and transferred her data, a key fact in the story we’ll come back to later. So what on earth is going on, and why has this glitch baffled so many Apple employees?
@angelegsofia ♬ original sound - AngeleSofia
The curious incident of the alarm in the day-time
In a series of follow-up videos, Sofia has checked several different settings and tried a few different fixes to stop this phantom alarm. That includes turning off her sleep cycle, asking Siri to stop her alarm, checking the Health app, and more drastic measures like deleting her World Clock app, resetting her settings, and more. All of those actions have proved fruitless, but there’s still one thing she hasn’t tried.
Here at iMore, we like to think we know a thing or two about iPhones. Heck, we even have a resident ex-Apple Genius on staff who we’ve set to cracking this case. I say cracking, there doesn’t seem to be that much to it. Our man in the know, John-Anthony Disotto, is fervent that the most obvious course of action for Sofia, in this case, should be to fully erase her phone and set up the device as new.
The fact this alarm is a persistent issue that has been passed from device to device makes it clear there seems to be some kind of software glitch that needs to be ironed out, and a full reset seems to be the obvious solution. We also know it’s a likely solution because it's the one thing Sofia has definitely not tried and refuses to do. In an update video this week, she responded to comments about performing a factory reset saying she wasn’t going to listen to them because “the 9:25 alarm is not bad enough for me to lose everything I have” (despite describing it as “the bane of my existence” in her original video) and that it would mean “the alarm wins.”
Personal vendettas aside, that first part isn’t quite true, because iCloud will still save all of Sofia’s most important personal information to be resynced to her device, such as her messages, contacts, photos, and even her passwords. It’s very easy to erase your iPhone, set it up as new, and then access nearly all your information again through iCloud. What’s more, Sofia has nothing to lose because, if it doesn’t work, she can simply re-erase the phone and restore her old iCloud backup, as if the phone had never been erased in the first place.
Should it come to that, it would certainly confirm this as one of the strangest iPhone glitches we’ve ever seen and vastly narrow down the explanations to just a few remaining theories. The most convincing alternative one I’ve seen relates to a commenter who claims to have had the same issue because a scammer added an event to their Mail account’s calendar every day until 2077. Before we get to theories that wild, however, please just reset the iPhone and tell us what happens.
