iPhone Physical Buttons Unresponsive

Suddenly tonight, all of the physical side buttons (volume, silent mode, and lock) on my wife’s second-gen SE have become unresponsive. Toggling the volume buttons doesn’t adjust volume, and there’s no on-screen indicator. Toggling the Silent Mode switch doesn’t activate Silent Mode, nor does the phone vibrate.

Most distressingly, pressing the side Lock button doesn’t lock the phone. Nor does long-pressing it bring up the power-off screen. It does nothing. The only way to power-off the phone is to do it through the Shut Down control in Settings. But, when we did that, we couldn’t restart the phone using the side button.

The Home button and touchscreen are working normally. It’s just the physical side buttons that have stopped working.

This is on a second-gen iPhone SE, running iOS 17.2.1. We’re in the process of updating the phone to 17.3, but it feels like a real hail-mary move.

Has anyone encountered this problem? If so, how might you have solved it?

Hmm. all the usual things to try (hard reset etc) require the buttons. my phone is still on ios16 so I can't check if this is a settings "feature".

assuming you've removed the case and checked for lint? moisture?

Yep, took the case off, blew out any supposed dust. I’ve poured through every setting I could find that might even remotely have some relation to the controls, but came up empty. The update to the iOS 17.3 didn’t fix it.

It’s just so weird that all the physical buttons would just fail all at once. That would seem to mean some controller or whatnot on the board went belly-up.

The missus has been looking for replacements. She’t trying to psyche herself into going with a Backmarket refurbed 2022 SE (the current phone is a 2020.) It’s twice as much as another refurbed 2020, though. We’ll see.

Do any of the buttons work when the phone is connected to a charger? Does anything change when you connect it to a computer (as if you were going to back it up or wipe it)?

I had an iPhone 8 decide to ignore some of its buttons once, but when I plugged it in and charged it for a bit (just a few minutes, it wasn’t “low”), I could turn it off, then turn it back on, and it ran fine after that.

Connecting to a charger doesn’t change anything. Buttons are still dead.

We did have one moment after (stupidly) shutting the phone off via the Shut Down control in the Settings. The phone wouldn’t restart by pressing the side button, of course. I was panicking because my wife needed the phone on. I connected the charger, and that seemed to kick-start the phone on. I can’t recall if I was mashing the button at the same time because, as I said, panic. But, after it restarted, the buttons were still dead.

We haven’t tried connecting to a computer. I’ll give that a shot.

So, my wife showed the phone to her office’s tech guy, and he said when the buttons start failing like that, it usually means the board itself is likely dying. Oh well.

She ordered a 2022 SE last night from Backmarket. Should be here Thursday.