Is your iOS device rebooting itself apparently at random this morning? You’re not alone.
Apple has a fairly rough week when it involves nasty software bugs. first there was that crazy admin login bypass in macOS – currently a flaw is causing iOS devices around the world to crash.
Here’s what’s happening: a glitch in the notifications system is crashing springboard, the part of iOS that handles your home screen.
Apps with daily notifications (workout apps, medication reminder apps, etc), above all, appear to be triggering the crash… however only when your device’s clock passes 12:15 AM on December 2nd, 2017. That it originates from apps with daily notifications means it’s not affecting everybody — but it also makes it pretty exhausting to slim down the list of impacted apps. There are simply too many.
The workaround: if you’ll be able to get your device to boot for some minutes without crashing and you’ll be able to keep in mind that apps send daily notifications, turn off notifications for those apps (Settings > Notifications > the app in question > toggle “Allow notifications”.)
(As a final resort, you’ll be able to go through and manually turn off notifications for each and every third-party app and work backwards in turning them back on… however that’s a pretty immense pain.)
Update: Once you’ve gotten your device to prevent resetting, update iOS. Apple has simply officially released iOS 11.2 to all, and it appears to repair this issue — but you’ll still ought to get your device stable enough to update, first. Once you’re on 11.2, you’ll be able to flip all those notifications back on.
What you almost certainly shouldn’t do, though some are recommending it, is set your system clock back to a time before December 2nd. a lot of things on modern devices tap the system clock as a part of their encryption/certification algorithms, therefore things (like, say, iMessage) begin to break once your system clock is way off. It won’t brick your device, but many apps and games will act funny. If you have to do it, make sure to line it back to automatic once you’re done.
If your iOS device isn’t crashing after December 2nd at 12:15 am local time, meanwhile, you seemingly don’t ought to do something. you probably don’t use any apps with local/scheduled notifications, or you’ve already got them turned off. Curiously, this bug doesn’t appear to be impacting users running the most recent iOS beta, iOS 11.2.
One might follow reports of the bug because it spreads round the world, starting in Australia. It’ll presumptively begin to hit West Coast United States phones shortly when this post is up.
