So, you’re happily swiping away on your iPhone when all of a sudden, it goes haywire—an app freezes up, the web browser spins and spins, or the screen simply stops responding to your fingertaps. Now what?

The iPhone’s “sleep/wake” button.

Well, you could always just try turning your iPhone on and off by pressing and holding the “sleep/wake” button on its top edge, but in some cases even the sleep button might not work.

Luckily, there’s another way to resuscitate a frozen, glitchy, or otherwise unresponsive iPhone: a so-called “hard” reset, which forces the iPhone to stop whatever it’s doing, shut down, and restart.

Think of it as waking your iPhone with a cold bucket of water rather than a gentle nudge—crude, but often effective.

Here’s what you do:

• Press and hold the “sleep/wake” button (at the top of the iPhone) and the Home button (below the screen) at the same time.
• Keep holding both buttons until a red slider reading “slide to power off” appears at the top of the screen (it may take a few seconds, so be patient). Instead of swiping the slider, keep on holding those buttons.
• After a few more seconds, the screen will go dark and the Apple logo will appear. Go ahead and release the buttons.
• Wait a bit longer, and your iPhone’s home screen should appear again. Phew!

Bonus tip

 
This same trick applies to the iPad—just press and hold both the sleep/wake button and the Home key, and you’ll force your iPad to restart.

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Tagged as: iPhone