IPhone Physical Buttons Unresponsive

February 2, 2024 7:02 PM

The physical buttons on my wife’s second-gen iPhone SE have suddenly stopped working. How can she get them back?

Suddenly tonight, all of the physical side buttons (volume, silent mode, and lock) have become unresponsive. Toggling the volume buttons doesn’t adjust volume, and there’s no on-screen indicator. Toggling the Silent Mode switch doesn’t activate Silent Mode, nor does the phone vibrate.

Most distressingly, pressing the side Lock button doesn’t lock the phone. Nor does long-pressing it bring up the power-off screen. It does nothing. The only way to power-off the phone is to do it through the Shut Down control in Settings. But, when we did that, we couldn’t restart the phone using the side button.

The Home button and touchscreen are working normally. It’s just the physical side buttons that have stopped working.

This is on a second-gen iPhone SE, running iOS 17.2.1. We’re in the process of updating the phone to 17.3, but it feels like a real hail-mary move.

Has anyone encountered this problem? If so, how might you have solved it?

posted by Thorzdad to Technology (5 answers total)

Quite honestly I would consider bringing the phone in to an Apple store at that point. It is probably possible to overcome with some of the accessibility settings, but I would not want to use it long-term like that. It seems likely there may be some sort of hardware issue, particularly since restarting the phone did not fix things.
posted by Alensin at 8:15 PM on February 2, 2024 [2 favorites]

I have a second generation iphone SE as well, purchased used in 2021. I like it! But at this point I think if it had an issue like that, I'd probably buy a new(er) phone, maybe used or refurbished, rather than putting money into getting it fixed. Take it to Apple, see what they can tell you for free, but if fixing it costs more than $75 and/or doesn't come with any kind of guarantee, I think a newer phone is a better investment.
posted by needs more cowbell at 1:42 AM on February 3, 2024

I was going to suggest using Siri to reboot the phone but if you're installing the new OS, that would be part of it.
posted by dobbs at 2:28 PM on February 3, 2024

Response by poster: Jumping in to say that the OS update (and reboot) did nothing to solve the problem. All buttons are still dead.
posted by Thorzdad at 5:33 AM on February 4, 2024

That sounds like it's time for a genius bar visit or a new phone, unfortunately.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 6:22 AM on February 5, 2024