It looks like Apple's New Year's hangover is lasting a little longer than usual.
In a post on its official support website on Wednesday, Apple promised that the bug affecting its Do Not Disturb setting would resolve itself after Jan. 7. Unfortunately for iPhone and iPad owners, no fix for the error would be made available in the interim.
The official response from Apple follows almost two days of mystery, during which theories explaining the cause of the glitch flew, and Apple was forced to relive an embarrassing New Year's incident involving non-functioning iPhone alarm clocks from two years prior. At least one writer on HuffPost blamed Apple for the loss of her job.
The story surrounding the New Year's Day iPhone bug this time around pertained to Do Not Disturb, a new feature introduced with the new iOS 6 operating system this past June that allows owners to schedule a regular start time and end time during which calls, text messages and emails will not cause the phone to ring or vibrate, regardless of whether the phone is set to silent. The Do Not Disturb bug, which apparently began plaguing iPhones and iPads at the stroke of midnight on Jan. 1, causes the phone to ignore the existence of that end time, and keeps the phone on Do Not Disturb mode after the user has set it to finish.
This resulted in some unpleasant New Year's mornings, as those who depends on phone calls or text messages to wake up were left snoozing.
For two days, the cause of the bug, and the length of time users would have to wait to continue using the Do Not Disturb function, remained shrouded in mystery. Now, while acknowledging the error, Apple is offering only one piece of advice regarding Do Not Disturb: Don't use it.
A screenshot of Apple's support page for the Do Not Disturb glitch.
Adding to Apple's "Groundhog Day"-esque misery, the company released an unfortunately-timed new advertisement touting Do Not Disturb at the beginning of the new year, almost exactly simultaneous with the discovery of the feature's failure:
As a writer for The Unofficial Apple Weblog (like The Huffington Post, also owned by AOL) points out, the bug is likely too minor, and will resolve itself too quickly, for Apple to proactively do anything about it. "[T]here's no way [Apple] can get a patch written for iOS, run through internal testing to ensure nothing else was accidentally broken, then release... to the world before January 7," wrote Richard Gaywood on Wednesday morning.
That may be true, but it is cold comfort for those who rely on Do Not Disturb to regulate their morning routines. HuffPost's own Bianca Bosker is a fan, having praised DND as the "most exciting (and underrated) new feature" to come out with iOS 6 this past summer.
Jan. 7 is but days away now. But malcontents might just have to consent to being disturbed a little while longer.
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