How to Stop Your IPhone From Accidentally Calling 911
Dialing a number right next to someone is awkward enough, but it’s a different story when it’s 911. You never want to look at your iPhone and see a current call to emergency services, but unfortunately, it’s all too easy to do. I’m guessing there’s a chance you’re reading this because you accidentally called 911 on your iPhone and want to avoid doing it again. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be that way.
Emergency SOS is the cause of many accidental 911 calls.
The reason for these false emergency calls is a feature called Emergency SOS. (Not to be confused with Satellite SOS , which allows you to contact emergency services when you don’t have a signal.) On the surface, this is a great option: The emergency service dials 911 for you using a simple shortcut, so you don’t you have to spend time opening the Phone app and entering numbers yourself. When time is of the essence, it is obviously important to contact emergency services as quickly as possible, and Emergency SOS can help with this.
Of course, when something is so easy to use in an emergency, it’s just as easy to use when nothing is going on. Now the police are angry at you for wasting their time and you are upset about the whole situation.
How Emergency SOS works on iPhone
If this feature is enabled on your iPhone, there are actually two different ways to activate Emergency SOS. The first and original way is to press the power button five times in a row. In recent years, Apple has also added the ability to hold the side button and any volume button to activate this feature. These actions trigger a short countdown, accompanied by a frankly scary alarm (if it’s on); at the end of the countdown, your phone will automatically call 911. Depending on your device, Emergency SOS can do other things, such as automatically notifying your emergency contacts that you’re in trouble. So if you don’t call 911, your close friends and family may also be told you’re in trouble when you’re not.
There are a lot of problems with this setup, especially the five-button-press method. First, the power button is used for other shortcuts, not just emergency SOS. For example, on an iPhone, you double-click the side button to confirm Apple Pay; if something goes wrong and you try too hard to confirm, you’ll activate an emergency SOS. Likewise, if you mistake the power button for the volume button, it means that if you try to turn the volume up or down five steps at the same time, you’ll instantly dial 911.
One day this feature turned off while my iPhone was in the cup holder of my car. Due to the potholes on Manhattan’s Park Avenue, the side button was pressed at least five times in a row, and my heart almost stopped when I heard the SOS signal.
However, Emergency SOS must be configured before it can be activated. If you’ve never set up Emergency SOS at all, this issue won’t apply to you, but for those of us who have used this feature, even if we don’t remember it, you can stop future random calls if you want.
How to Stop Your iPhone from Automatically Calling 911
On your iPhone, go to Emergency SOS in the Settings app. To prevent Emergency SOS from automatically dialing 911, disable Hold and Release Calling and 5-Click Calling . If you’re confident that you won’t be able to hold down the side button and volume button long enough to call 911 unless you really need it, you can leave this option enabled.
But you don’t actually have to enable this option to access the emergency shortcut using this gesture. Regardless of the settings you choose, holding the Side button and Volume button together will open a new menu that includes a shutdown slider, a medical ID slider, and an emergency call slider. If you turn off Call with Hold and Release , you can still use this gesture to raise the slider and swipe it to contact emergency services.
It’s not always an emergency SOS call
While the Emergency SOS shortcut is the most common reason people accidentally call 911, there’s another Apple feature that can call emergency services on your behalf: Failure Detection. It works on both iPhone and Apple Watch and automatically calls 911 if it detects that you’ve been in a car accident.
This is great if you actually have an accident, but what if you just fell while skiing ? This is exactly what happened to some Apple Watch users whose watch dialed 911 after its owners simply slipped on a slope. Luckily, this issue appears to have been largely fixed in subsequent software updates.
What if I accidentally call 911 on my iPhone?
If you accidentally call 911 from your iPhone, the only thing you need to do is stay on the line and explain your situation. It’s unfortunate, but hanging up is not the right call: Emergency officials won’t assume everything is okay just because you ended the call. In fact, they may think the opposite, and you may end up spending more time and resources than you would have by simply saying, “Sorry, my iPhone accidentally called 911. I’m fine.”