PSA: Daylight Savings Time kicks in tonight, keep an eye on your iPhone

By Allyson Kazmucha
last updated

Daylight Savings Time starts tonight at 2 a.m. and as we all know, the iPhone has been notorious for causing issues with alarms, in turn causing folks to be late for work, appointments, and what have you. If it's any indication of what will happen again this year, here's some things you can do to Daylight Savings Time proof your iPhone alarms.

Last year, the glitch seems to affect non-recurring alarms. While your iPhone would move the time ahead an hour correctly, non-recurring alarms didn't seem to take the switch and were going off an hour late. To try and prevent this, and we know it sucks, we'd recommend creating a recurring alarm just in case your regular one doesn't go off.

Another option would be to turn off time zone support completely and just update the time accordingly when you need to. Annoying, yes, but perhaps necessary. We aren't quite sure why Apple can't seem to get issues like Daylight Savings Time issues fixed, but until they do and we don't hear of anymore issues, we recommend you plan accordingly either with another alarm clock or by setting multiple alarms on your iPhone.

Did you experience any issues last year? What do you plan on doing this year to prevent them? Let us know below in the comments!

Allyson Kazmucha
Allyson Kazmucha

iMore senior editor from 2011 to 2015.

18 Comments
  • I'm using the rise app should I still use the built in alarm as a back up?
  • Sheesh! It's that time already? Anyway, I've never been affected by a bug in regard to the time change and my alarms went off on time. Hopefully, things won't change this time around either.
  • And while you're changing your clocks... change your batteries - in any battery powered device you keep around the house to monitor things that help you protect your health and safety... smoke detectors, etc... and glucose monitors and those kind of things too...
  • Good point. Even the best batteries lose significant capacity over time. Definitely a good reason to replace batteries periodically - generally once a year - and stick to purchasing devices with batteries that are readily replaced. Some off-brand devices use hard-to-find batteries - or are designed such that you can't even replace the battery at all and have to have the device remanufactured or replaced every year or so, just to maintain normal performance! Incredible!
  • Daylight Saving, not Savings. Sorry to be "that guy," but it's a pet peeve. :)
  • Exactlly!!! You'd think intelligent people who know this: we're "saving" time (daylight), not "savings" time.
  • It's a pet peeve and annoying when people describe themselves as "that guy" haha!!! But yeah I agree with you.
  • I had one issue in the past, but was a Verizon tower issue. The tower wasnt updated correctly. If you wake up tomorrow and have an issue, also a good place to check if you've tried all on device workarounds.
  • Thank you for the info..
  • Welcome in Daylight Saving time !! Checked my 4S about 4am
  • Ok let's try this again- checked at 4am & the time was updated with no issues as well as DnD turning off at the proper time. (For some reason using the iMore blog app to comment, cut off my response & I can not edit it)
  • Aargh! A while back I was having trouble with a rogue Verizon tower jacking up my date/time when I was using Runkeeper in a particular park, thus messing up my workout in GymPact. I ended up turning off "Set Automatically" and last night after reading this article saw that I had never turned that back on. I figured I would just leave it off and manually adjust for DST. Well, evidently Set Automatically has nothing to do with the DST adjust and the phone adjusted itself again and then woke me an hour early. I should have just left it all alone since I experienced no problem with it last year.
  • Ok, after waking up an hour early, as noted above, instead of adjusting and resetting my alarm I just set a one hour timer. I then turned back on Set Automatically which adjusted my time back forward the hour. I just now noticed that it also added one hour to my timer. So not only did the phone wake me an hour early, it followed up by trying to wake me an hour late. I can tell it's going to be a fun day. :)
  • Time change over worked. We'll see if my alarms still work.
  • Mine updated fine, alarm went off fine.
  • I hate DST.
  • My phone didn't change. Luckily I woke up early enough on my own and I am able to get to work on time. DST is so stupid. And working on the weekend is even worse. I have an iPhone 5 jail broken with iOS 6.1.1 in case you were wondering. But I also set my iPod touch running iOS 4.1.2 and its time changed automatically. Apple obviously needs to fix something here.
  • The world should do away with DST already. And while we're at it, any Election Day in any country should be a holiday from work. That being said, mine seemed to have updated fine and alarms went off as normal. I still ignored and slept through them, though...