Daylight Saving Time ends this weekend in the U.S., which means that on Sunday at 2:00 a.m. the clock gets rolled back to 1:00 a.m. again. In other words, we get an extra hour of sleep. At least, that is how it is supposed to work. If you have a repeating alarm that you created in your iPhone’s clocks app, there is a good chance that it won’t make the successful adjustment this weekend. Thus, you may think you have an alarm going off at 8am, but it may instead go off earlier or later.
Apple posted a Support Document on this bug yesterday, and it doesn’t say very much:
Symptoms
In some regions, shortly before or after the daylight saving time (DST) change, repeating alarms created in the Clock app may work incorrectly.
Products Affected
iPod touch (4th generation), iPod touch (3rd generation), iPhone 3G, iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPod touch (2nd generation)
Resolution
To resolve this behavior for existing alarms, set the repeat interval to Never. You will need to reset these alarms for each day you need them. After November 7th, 2010, you can set your alarms to repeat again.
Apple has apparently known about this problem for a while. This past weekend when the time changed in many European countries, a lot of people reported having problems with iPhone alarms, as Lex Friedman of Macworld notes. New Zealand changed time a few weeks earlier and the problem hit some people there. According to AppleInsider, Apple already has a fix in the next version of the iPhone operating system, iOS 4.2. Unfortunately, however, iOS 4.2 hasn’t been released yet and it seems unlikely that it will come out before Sunday, meaning the fix will be too late.
Even if you use your iPhone as an alarm clock, this bug might not affect you. I use the alarm function on my iPhone to wake up almost every morning, but I don’t use repeating alarms. Every night I set an alarm based on whatever time I need to get up the next day, which varies somewhat from day to day. You can see whether an alarm is repeating by going into the Clock app, tapping the Alarm button at the bottom, tapping the Edit button at the top, and then tapping on a preset alarm. On the Edit Alarm page, the first option is Repeat, and if it is set on “Never” instead of an option like “Every Monday” than you won’t have a problem:
Hopefully this bug will not affect many of you, but if you use repeating alarms, you might consider using a backup alarm until iOS 4.2 comes out — which hopefully is in just a few days.
Certainly a devil of a problem – Outlook had issues a couple of years ago, screwing up calendar notifications and event times. We really need to get on GMT and stay there, aside from the examples above, this week, the EU switched off their Summer Time – one week ahead of the US.
So does this mean that I can blame my being late to work on my alarm not working? It’s kind of like Y2K all over again. ha!