3 ms·

Would you mind sharing what the culprit was? This sounds really curious.

IgorPartola 6y ago
Basically it had to do with recurring events in an Outlook calendar. The protocol which was used to connect that calendar to the iOS calendar app would specify the end date of the recurrence as NULL and every night the calendar app would do some kind of processing of future events (I am fuzzy on the details here), and that NULL value would cause a crash that resulted all the way in a kernel panic. Wiping the device clean and trying to isolate which app was the problem was useless since I’d connect all my calendars from a backup automatically and then the resets would start again. It followed from one device to another because I shared my calendar with my wife and so her iPhone and iPad eventually caught this affliction too (which made it seem like my phone infected hers). And it was impossible for me to reproduce since it only happened during whatever the calendar app was doing and when it hit whatever recurring event was causing the trouble. In the end, after countless searches, posts on various social media sites seeing if anyone else had this problem, and bug reports to Apple I came across a Stack Overflow post that described kernel panics caused by the calendar app and said something about Outlook calendars specifically. So I went and disabled that calendar on one of the devices and the issue didn’t return. So eventually I got ahold of higher tier support at Apple and they had me talk to an engineer who took down careful notes. In a few months a point iOS release came out and made a vague reference to fixing calendar app bugs. The issue never recurred after and I never heard anything from Apple about it again, though they did promise to follow up. In either case I’m happy. Having your phone that you use as an alarm flashing and buzzing all night as it reboots every 90 seconds isn’t good for getting sleep.

Basically it had to do with recurring events in an Outlook calendar. The protocol which was used to connect that calendar to the iOS calendar app would specify the end date of the recurrence as NULL and every night the calendar app would do some kind of processing of future events (I am fuzzy on the details here), and that NULL value would cause a crash that resulted all the way in a kernel panic. Wiping the device clean and trying to isolate which app was the problem was useless since I’d connect all my calendars from a backup automatically and then the resets would start again. It followed from one device to another because I shared my calendar with my wife and so her iPhone and iPad eventually caught this affliction too (which made it seem like my phone infected hers). And it was impossible for me to reproduce since it only happened during whatever the calendar app was doing and when it hit whatever recurring event was causing the trouble. In the end, after countless searches, posts on various social media sites seeing if anyone else had this problem, and bug reports to Apple I came across a Stack Overflow post that described kernel panics caused by the calendar app and said something about Outlook calendars specifically. So I went and disabled that calendar on one of the devices and the issue didn’t return. So eventually I got ahold of higher tier support at Apple and they had me talk to an engineer who took down careful notes. In a few months a point iOS release came out and made a vague reference to fixing calendar app bugs. The issue never recurred after and I never heard anything from Apple about it again, though they did promise to follow up. In either case I’m happy. Having your phone that you use as an alarm flashing and buzzing all night as it reboots every 90 seconds isn’t good for getting sleep.