iOS 27 Bug Temporarily Freezes iPhones and Spreads as Social Media Prank

According to the report, the sequence begins on the Home Screen. A user pulls down from the top-left corner as if opening Notification Center. Almost immediately, well before Notification Center finishes sliding down, the user pulls down from the right-hand corner to open Control Center. Dismissing Control Center can then leave the phone in the affected state.

When that happens, 9to5Mac said, the lock screen Camera and Torch buttons often become stuck at the top of the screen. The clearer sign is that the user can no longer swipe between home screens. Apps may still open, but taps do not reliably register on interface elements, making navigation unreliable. Attempting to hold the side button to reach the slide-to-power-off screen does not work either because the slider does not respond to the swipe gesture.

The solution is to force-reboot the iPhone. On modern iPhones, that means pressing the volume up button once, pressing the volume down button once, then holding the side button until the Apple logo appears. The device then restarts and returns to normal, according to the report.

9to5Mac said the bug is not difficult to trigger but only works in a small window, so users may need to repeat the swipes a few times. The publication reported that it could reliably reproduce the issue within about two or three attempts on an iPhone Air running iOS 27.0, and that it also occurs on the just-released iOS 27.2 beta. The report included a screen recording showing the top-left swipe followed by the quick top-right swipe.

The report noted that similar soft-locks have existed in various versions of iOS, and Apple usually eventually addresses them. Some past bugs required complex sequences of taps and gestures, while the iOS 27 sequence described by 9to5Mac is simple to perform.