How to Turn Off SOS on iPhone

Apple’s Emergency SOS feature allows you to quickly alert your emergency contacts and services for help. Unarguably, it’s a super useful feature that saves critical time in emergencies. Sometimes, this feature may trigger accidentally when your curious child is playing with your phone, or you’re safely enjoying some adventure. If this has happened frequently, it makes sense to turn off Emergency SOS and re-enable it when needed. This article explains how you can turn off Emergency SOS on an iPhone to stop accidental calls to 911 and other services. Also, if your iPhone is showing SOS, we’ve shared some quick ways to turn it off.

How to Turn Off Emergency SOS on iPhone

There’s no universal toggle to turn on/off Emergency SOS on an iPhone. That said, you can easily turn this feature off by disabling all the activation shortcuts in the Settings app. Here’s what you need to do:

1. Open the Settings app on your iPhone and tap on Emergency SOS.
2. To disable manual shortcuts that trigger Emergency SOS, turn off the Call with Hold and Release and Call with 5 Button Presses toggles.

3. On iPhone 14 or later, you can turn off the Call After Serious Crash toggle to disable automatic Crash Detection calling. However, we recommend keeping it feature ON. Your iPhone will always start a countdown and sound an alarm before making the call. If you’re enjoying bumping cars or rollercoasters in an adventure park, you can turn this feature off to avoid raising any false alarms.

Bear in mind that even with these settings off, you can still launch Emergency SOS through the power-off options. Simply press and hold the Side button and one of the Volume buttons simultaneously, and then swipe the Emergency SOS slider to initiate a call.

How to Turn Off “SOS” or “SOS Only” on iPhone

Sometimes you might be stuck in situations where you see “SOS” or “SOS Only” in the status bar on your iPhone. It’s worth knowing that SOS is different from Emergency SOS services on iPhones, and it indicates network connection issues. In such cases, you can’t make phone calls, send messages, or access other basic functionalities. Rather, you can only call ambulance, fire, police, and emergency services available in your country/region. If you’ve got an iPhone 14 or later, you can also send satellite alerts.

In most cases, a poor network connection or a faulty SIM card is responsible for why your iPhone is in SOS mode. You can move to a different area, toggle the Airplane mode, toggle Mobile Data, restart your iPhone, check your SIM card, update iOS, or contact your network provider. If you’re traveling, make sure to enable Data Roaming on your iPhone.

For complete details, you can visit our dedicated guide on what SOS mean on an iPhone and how to fix it.

That’s how you can turn off Apple’s Emergency SOS shortcuts to avoid making any accidental emergency calls. You now also know how to fix SOS on an iPhone. If you have any queries, you can drop them in the comments below.