How To Deal With Your iPhone, When It Doesn’t Turn Off

It might be a rarest of the rare possibility but sometimes it may so happen: your iPhone refuses to switch off. What if you are pressing the Sleep/Wake button to turn off your phone but to your dismay, there is no action. You might get worried thinking that the iPhone has had a break down, or it has some other issue.

Most of you might never face this issue, but there’s always an ‘if’? As you can’t take out the battery of the iPhone to restart the phone, you must know how to deal with this dicey situation.

In this article, we have discussed how to deal with your iPhone, when it won’t turn off.

Before going further, let’s rule out certain possibilities due to which this issue might have occurred.

• Due to a Software issue, it got frozen.
• The Sleep/Wake button is broken (worst scenario 🙁
• The screen is broken and isn’t responding to touch.

Fix The iPhone That Won’t Turn Off

So coming to the point, now that you know the certain possibilities of the issue, you can check the steps to resolve it.

There are three ways to try and  fix your iPhone before taking it to the Apple Store:

Step 1: Hard Reset

The easiest way to turn off your iPhone is performing a hard reset. Although it is quite similar to the normal way, you turn your iPhone on or off, it  also does a complete reset of the device and its memory.

To hard reset your iPhone:

• Press and hold Sleep/Wake button along with Home button simultaneously but you have iPhone 7 series phone, then Press and hold Sleep/Wake button with volume down together.
• The power sign with the slider will appear on the screen. Keep holding the button until it goes black.
• Once you see Apple logo on the screen, let go of the buttons and the iPhone will restart normally. When the phone starts up, everything should be right in the world.

Step 2: Enable Assistive Touch and Turn Off Via Software

If the Sleep/Wake button is broken, the first step would not work. Luckily, you can turn off your iPhone using an inbuilt software Assistive Touch from  Settings app.

Assistive Touch is a feature that allows you to control your iPhone entirely from the screen. It is very useful when your iPhone’s buttons are troubling you.

To enable Assistive Touch –

• Navigate to Settings

Tap on General -> Accessibility -> AssistiveTouch.

• Now slide the toggle to the right to turn on the feature.

Once enabled, you would see a light gray colored square with a light colored circle in it on the screen.

• Whenever you tap on it, it will show you the menu.
• To turn off the device with Assistive Touch, tap on it. A square with a few options like Device, Siri, Custom, Control Centre etc will appear.
• Tap on Device.
• You will get a few options like Lock Screen, Rotate Screen, Mute, etc.
• Tap and hold Lock Screen icon.
• You will get a screen that says “slide to power off.”
• Drag the red power icon from left to right to turn off your iPhone.

Now that the iPhone is turned off, you must be wondering how to turn on the phone, if the Sleep/Wake Button doesn’t work!

Worry not, this also has a solution. Plug the device into power, Apple icon will appear on the screen and phone would work normally.

Step 3: Restore iPhone from Backup

Aforementioned steps are for the hardware issue,if these two ways don’t work for you, then it might be a software issue.

As it is not easy to determine whether the issue is of the ios software or the apps, it is better to restore your iPhone from backup. This step will remove all the settings, data and customization done on your phone.

To restore iPhone from backup, follow these steps:

• Connect your iPhone to your computer.
• Open iTunes, if it doesn’t open on its own.
• Locate iPhone icon from the top left corner, beneath the playback controls.
• In the backup section, click Backup Now. This step will create a backup of your data.
• Once done, click Restore Backup.
• Now follow the onscreen instructions to restore the backup.
• Select the backup created to restore when prompted.
• Once done, your iPhone will start up normally.

If the issue still persists, you should visit Apple Store or talk to them over the phone, they will surely resolve the issue.

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