Something pretty serious happened to my iPhone 16e last night. I’ll be heading out to see if someone can have a look at it later today hopefully, but I figured I should still detail it here.
I was using the audio graph feature with voiceover to listen to a chart. It played the graph, but then after that it just completely froze. The buttons still work and Siri still responds, but the touch screen is completely unresponsive and voiceover will not speak. And I can’t restart it because of that. I’m lucky to have other devices that I can use until this gets resolved but I felt like this should be something that people should know about.
Unfortunately I don’t remember what version of iOS 18 specifically it was and don’t currently have the means of checking.
By Zoe Victoria, 21 April, 2025
Forum
iOS and iPadOS
Comments
You can't restart with Siri?
I'm not even sure how to restart with buttons or whatever. I just tell Siri to restart the phone, it asks me if I really want to, I say yes, and it restarts.
Try force restarting, should work in a situation like this
To force restart your iPhone, press the volume up, immediately the volume down key, then hold the lock button for 10 seconds.
that's strange
This is very odd. Restarting with Siri should work if Siri responds. A force restart should in all cases work and I have had to resort to this when things have gotten stuck in a glitch. I am not sure how it is on an IPhone 16 but on my 14 all I do is ;oquicly press the up and then down volume buttons and then hold the lock button for a few seconds. If this does not work, try connecting it to a computer and reset the device. Wait with that though until you know you have to. I am not sure if this is a software or hardware issue but from what I can tell it is a software issue.
I've experienced this
Unfortunately, I've experienced this myself. A force restart didn't work, nor did trying to get Siri's attention. Sadly, my only option was to let the phone die, as even toggling voiceover via iTunes didn't work.
Are you sure you've not muted the phone?
If not and siri works, you should be able to turn off voiceover and then say something like, hey siri, turn on VoiceOver.
Nope
Having experienced this, I can confirm the phone will have volume, but is otherwise literally almost completely unresponsive. Sometimes I could get voiceover to respond, but only in so much as I get the there's nothing here bong sound. Literally nothing else worked.
Try this
If you can activate Siri, and can actually hear Siri, give Siri this command,
"unmute"
This will be without quotes, and without saying any other keywords.
The reason I am suggesting this is because Siri has the ability to, mute, and, unmute, media volume. This unfortunately includes VoiceOver speech volume.
So, my suggestion is to try using the, unmute, when you activate Siri, and hopefully you will get voice speech volume turn back up.
Power off
If restart does not work, go to setting, general and shutdown and turn phone on.
This has also happened to me
About a month ago on my iPhone 16 this happened to me also. I had to use Apple support to help me. I could not hear voice over at all, even though I knew it was running since I could hear the boundary reached sound. So I could not use the screen. I reset the phone and that didn’t help. I called Apple accessibility, by using Siri and that was all I could do because I could not put in my passcode. Even using the volume buttons didn’t help. They found out finally after being on tech-support for a while that all the settings of volume had been turned down and would not come up high enough to hear. Going into settings with help by sharing my screen, the tech and a sighted friend they were able to raise the volume of the default voice. Problem fixed.