iPhone alarm bug makes Brits late for work after clocks go back
A bug in the iPhone OS resulted in many UK iPhone owners waking up an hour later than they wanted this morning, after Sunday's daylight-saving time switch.
Many iPhone owners had an unwanted extra hour of sleep this morning, due to a bug in iOS4 not resetting its alarms properly after the clocks went back.
Early on Sunday morning, the clock on the iPhone 4, 3GS and 3G automatically -- and correctly -- made the change from British Summer Time to Greenwich Mean Time. Unfortunately, it didn't update its alarm settings, meaning the phone woke people an hour later than they wanted.
This left many cursing Apple, Steve Jobs and the fabled black handset. Joe from Average Joes blog wrote, "I, like no doubt thousands of others this morning am late for work. Why am I late for work? One simple word, Apple. No I did not trip over one in the fruit isle in Tesco, instead it seems thousands upon thousands of us found an iPhone iOS bug the hard way this morning."
CNET UK reader Andrew Orriss emailed in to say how annoyed he was when the alarm he set for 6.15am went off at 7.15am. "I have since set a number of test alarms and indeed they are all going off one hour later than the time they are set for," he wrote. "This is quite a major flaw as it would be far simpler to adjust the clock once than all of my different alarm settings."
A poster on the Apple forum wrote, "This may seem like a minor issue but I almost missed a flight in the UK this morning... not good and nearly very, very costly..."
It looks like there's a workaround where you can delete all your alarms, set time automatically to off and set an alarm for each single day. But apparently if you then try to set up a recurring alarm it will still chime an hour late. For now, this can only be solved by setting the alarm one hour earlier than it needs to be.
The problem only seems to have affected iOS4 users, and was first discovered in Australia early last month, as our sister site ZDNet Australia reported. At the time, Apple said it was aware of the issue and a software update was in the works. We'll let you know if that arrives in time for the US putting its clocks back next weekend.
Image credit: Misterbrilliant, via Twitter