If you use your iPhone as an alarm clock, it might be time for a backup plan.
An iPhone programming bug that failed to activate the phone's built-in alarm has left a lot of customers upset, confused and late. Apple had acknowledged the problem existing but said it would automatically fix itself by Monday, January 3.
Yet, the problem does not seem to have gone away. A lot of angry iPhone owners wrote in to The New York Times complaining that they had missed flights, were late for work or had failed to drop their kids off for the first day of the 2011 school year -- all because the iPhone alarm didn't work again.
Apple did not respond to a request for comment asking if there was an update to the programming error.
The problem seems to have affected so many customers that it became a trending topic on Twitter by late Monday morning. Most were irate that they had been assured that the phone would work properly for their first day back to work but instead remained silent all morning long.
Erick Piller, a student who uses his iPhone as a primary alarm, said in an e-mail that he missed a scheduled flight this morning after Apple assured the media that the alarm would begin work again on Monday morning. "I set a nonrepeating alarm for 3:30 a.m. Monday, but when I woke up by chance at 4 a.m., it hadn't gone off," Mr. Piller said. "I ended up missing a flight by 15 minutes."
Other readers wrote in to say that they thought they were "going crazy," or had somehow broken their phone, when the alarm didn't work again on Monday morning.
It was unclear if the alarm error affected only iPhone 4 owners, but by Monday a number of readers said their earlier model iPhone 3GS and iPhone 3G had failed to work properly, too.
One of the most popular messages on Twitter about the problem was written by the comedian Andy Borowitz, who said: "Steve Jobs was set to hold a press conference on iPhone alarm glitch, but he overslept."