How to Unsilence Calls on iPhone

Wondering why your iPhone is silencing your calls? If you have noticed that incoming phone calls and other alerts are silent and not ringing on the iPhone, it’s likely there’s a setting or a switch that was activated to mute the iPhone.

We’ll walk through the most common reasons why an iPhone has silenced calls, and show you how to unsilence them on iPhone so that phone calls make noise again.

Toggle the Physical Mute Button Switch

Make sure the physical Mute switch button on the side of the iPhone is in the off position.

If the mute switch is in the On position, it will mute all the calls and it will show the red line like in the picture below.

If the mute button is active, all sounds and phone calls will be silent on iPhone.

Turn Off Focus / Do Not Disturb Mode

Focus modes and Do Not Disturb mode will default to silencing your phone calls and other sound effects. You can turn this off easily.

1. Go to “Settings” then go to “Focus” or “Do Not Disturb” (depending on iOS version)
2. Toggle the switch OFF

Turn Volume Up

Often people have inadvertently turned the volume down on their iPhone, or someone else using their phone turned the volume down. This is particularly common if you fiddle with an iPhone in your pocket, or let young kids handle an iPhone.

1. Go to “Settings” then go to “Sounds & Haptics”
2. For Ringers & Alerts, slide the volume slider to the right to increase the volume of the ringer and alert sounds

Turn Off Silence Unknown Callers

The iPhone has a setting that silences unknown callers automatically, which means if people are not in your contacts list, those calls will be silenced. You can turn this feature off easily:

1. Go to “Settings” then go to “Phone”
2. Tap on “Silence Unknown Callers” and turn that to the OFF position

Are you pressing buttons when the call comes in?

Note that if a call comes into the iPhone and you press the volume button on the phone during the incoming call, that will silence the incoming call, stop it from ringing, and stop it from vibrating. Thus when a call comes in and if you’re thinking you want to adjust the volume of the ringer to be louder or more quiet, pressing any volume button actually silences that call completely instead.

You can change the audio volume of calls using the buttons or Settings > Sounds.

–

Now you know how to unsilence your iPhone and make calls ring again. Which trick worked for you? Let us know your experiences in the comments.