For many users, iMessage is currently down, and users are unable to send or receive texts on iPhone. Unfortunately, Apple devices have a pesky bug that’s existed for almost a decade now where they won’t fall back to SMS when the service isn’t available. Fortunately, there are a few ways to fix this annoyance so you can continue to use messaging on your phone.
How to fix iMessage not sending or receiving texts
It’s hard to believe it’s 2022, and iPhones still have issues sending texts when iMessage is down. There are two ways to fix this:
- Restart your phone.
- Turn off iMessage.
The same problem has persisted since Apple launched the service on iOS 5 over a decade ago. Your phone is supposed to fall back to SMS and MMS when iMessage isn’t available, just like it does when you text an Android phone. However, this rarely works as designed.
Restarting your phone is typically enough to trigger the switch over to SMS. It’s an easy enough fix, and it’ll normally switch back over to iMessage automatically when it comes back online. Unfortunately, however, this doesn’t work 100% of the time.
Sometimes, you’ll need to deactivate the feature to get your phone to use SMS. To do so:
- Open Settings
- Enter Message settings
- Toggle iMessage off
Even once you do this, you’ll sometimes need to restart the phone to receive texts.
