Some iPhones are mysteriously turning off at night – iOS 17.0.3 could be the culprit

The iPhone 15 being held in a hand
Check what your iPhone 15 is up to overnight (Image credit: Future)

Multiple users are reporting their iPhones mysteriously turning off for several hours during the night, and right now it's not clear what's causing it – or if the problem is related to the recent roll out of iOS 17.

It's difficult to assess how widespread the issue is, but it's definitely happening: reports are coming in from MacRumors, 9to5Mac, and Reddit. Users are having to enter their PINs when they wake up (suggesting a reboot has happened), and are also noticing a gap of several hours in the iOS battery health graph.

You can see if there's a gap in the graph on your own iPhone by opening Settings, then tapping Battery. If there are no green lines on the chart for the early hours of the morning, then you too have been hit by the weird bug.

As yet Apple hasn't officially acknowledged the problem, or said anything about a fix. So if your iPhone is randomly rebooting while you're asleep, there's not much you can do about it. You might want to set your morning alarm on another device though, just to be sure.

No explanation yet

This seems to be affecting multiple phones, so it's not just limited to the new iPhone 15. On the software side, most people affected seem to be using iOS 17.0.3. As such, it's possible that the latest update is to blame, but not all the reports include an iOS version, making it hard to know for sure.

Various explanations have been put forward by the sleuths of the internet, with suggestions ranging from some kind of aggressive memory management to related battery settings like Optimized Charging.

A lot of the complaints are people chiming in to say they've had the same experience without giving any extra details, which means it's not easy to see a pattern in what's happening – but it's definitely worth keeping an eye on.

The most likely outcome is that Apple will squash whatever bug this is in the next iOS update. Just a few days ago we saw a fix issued for iPhone 15 overheating problems, so let's hope there aren't too many more software issues to deal with.

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David Nield
Freelance Contributor

Dave is a freelance tech journalist who has been writing about gadgets, apps and the web for more than two decades. Based out of Stockport, England, on TechRadar you'll find him covering news, features and reviews, particularly for phones, tablets and wearables. Working to ensure our breaking news coverage is the best in the business over weekends, David also has bylines at Gizmodo, T3, PopSci and a few other places besides, as well as being many years editing the likes of PC Explorer and The Hardware Handbook.

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