Why is ‘General” under ’System Services’ using excessive cellular data?

Darn! Yesterday my phone did it again…. All of my data gone in a few minutes…

I'm just about ready to try erasing my phone and starting over from scratch - not even restoring from a backup…

guildfordnz wrote:

My cell phone plan has just renewed, ....

if I restart my phone while out of wifi coverage, the 1Gb of data disappears rapidly (within minutes) and the culprit is System Services/General.

Or the culprit is your provider, indicated and measured by Systems Serviced, General

LD150 wrote:

guildfordnz wrote:

My cell phone plan has just renewed, ....

if I restart my phone while out of wifi coverage, the 1Gb of data disappears rapidly (within minutes) and the culprit is System Services/General.

Or the culprit is your provider, indicated and measured by Systems Serviced, General

I strongly recommend anyone with this problem to get a hold of a monthly rolling cellular plan and test it for a week. Divert your calls to the new number then take off the current plan fir the test.

On May 29th I added a comment to the thread:

“All I have come up with so far is that if I restart my phone while out of wifi coverage, the 1Gb of data disappears rapidly (within minutes) and the culprit is System Services/General.

If I don’t restart my phone while out of wifi coverage, then everything seems to be fine and my data doesn’t disappear.”

So far (it’s only been a few days) I still haven’t had the data drain issue and I have moved from wifi to cell coverage several times.

I’m also not willing to restart my phone in cell coverage to see if I can replicate the issue as I don’t want to lose my data allocation for the month…

I seem to have fixed my problem. I ended up resetting and erasing all content and NOT restoring from backup. This wasn’t as traumatic as it sounds and was a great chance to clean up the apps on my phone. I now have a much reduced set - only the things I actually use. Because all of my passwords are stored in the passwords app on icloud, it was pretty easy to get everything working again. I’m back to my minimal data per month plan and all seems to be going well.

I resorted to resetting my phone and not restore from backup, it was a great opportunity to discard apps that I wasn’t using and not traumatic as so much is stored in iCloud. This solved part of my data drain issue.

However, I had noticed that my phone was still using excess data whenever I was out of wifi coverage - about 500Mb per time! So I turned off Apple Intelligence, but the data was still disappearing. I realised that the data was being used on the occasions that I used Siri. I turned Siri off completely and now I’m not seeing the data drains.

I will continue to monitor and will report back if the data drain issues reappear.

I was notified by Spectrum today that I also over used my allocated data and the System Services General Data was the guilty party, it used about 1.23 Gb. This is the very first time it ever happened. I am puzzled. It cost me 5 bucks.

I’m having the same problem. I have an iPhone 15 Pro Max using iOS 18.5.

I have a plan with limited data and normally this isn’t an issue - I am rarely out of Wifi coverage. The last 4 times I have been out of Wifi coverage, my phone has eaten all of my data - each time I have topped it up again and tried various fixes.

I am using Low data mode, data is off for all apps, I have turned off location services for everything except “Find my”, “Emergency calls and SOS” and “Setting time zone”; the only apps having access to location services are switched to “While using” and were not being used at the time of data drain.

I took a screen shot of my data usage at 4:35pm (21.4Mb) and another at 10:29pm (1.03Gb) and my phone had been turned off for about 2 of those hours. When I look at the data usage, it is mainly System services/General (1.02Gb)

You can see from the screenshots of messages from my cell phone provider that the data is disappearing rapidly - 204Mb in 1 minute on 6 May and 414Mb in 7 minutes on 20 May. I know that this usage on 20 May was after I had restarted my phone (it was turned off for about 2 hours while we were out).

Other than turning cellular data off altogether, how do I fix this???

[Edited by Moderator]

I spent about an hour with Apple support. They had no clue. They suggested to turn off Apple Intelligence (could be useful) and to turn off cellular data completely (it would work but then the iPhone would stop being a smartphone). So, so far no solution. I find it shocking that Apple seems or pretends to be unaware of the problem.

paulnevai wrote:

I spent about an hour with Apple support. They had no clue. They suggested to turn off Apple Intelligence (could be useful) and to turn off cellular data completely (it would work but then the iPhone would stop being a smartphone). So, so far no solution. I find it shocking that Apple seems or pretends to be unaware of the problem.

Did they ask if you had ANY security, speedtest or adblock apps including VPN?

If all your data is syncd to iCloud its a straightforward job to restore the phone to factory and set it up from scratch.

Whatever carp is on there will be in the backup, but Backup first just in case.

My cell phone plan has just renewed, so now I have more data to experiment with to see if I can find a cause for the data drain that I have.

All I have come up with so far is that if I restart my phone while out of wifi coverage, the 1Gb of data disappears rapidly (within minutes) and the culprit is System Services/General.

If I don’t restart my phone while out of wifi coverage, then everything seems to be fine and my data doesn’t disappear.

Same exact problem here. Happened when we upgraded to iOS 18 -> no new strange apps installed. All of a sudden System Services -> General, which hadn't even shown up in the top ten use cases before, is suddenly responsible for 80% of our monthly usage! The jump was drastic - my whole family easily shared a 10GB/month plan, and now even I can't fit in 10GB - and that's with not using my phone.

Did I mention this is with sending 95% of the time on WiFi, having all apps shut off from cellular use, and using low data mode?

The ONLY way to stop it is to turn cellular data off. But aspects of the phone literally can't function right over just WiFi, and this isn't why I have a phone.

Does anyone know what falls into this "general" category of apps? This problem has affected some folks since back in iOS 13.

Of course upgraded to the latest iOS - still no change. General uses up about a half gigabyte an hour even with the phone closed in my pocket and no apps running. I'm now faced with either paying for an unlimited plan - just because of an Apple Bug - or giving up my iPhone. This is crazy.

Like everyone else troubleshooting this problem, I've checked everything. No Wifi assist, etc. And it doesn't matter if you shut down individual app's access to cell use, or even individual system services, because none of those matter compared to System Services/general, which I haven't found a way to turn off.

Obviously this isn't affecting a LOT of users, else Apple would have to address it.

If there's anyone reading this who worked at Apple and can say what General means and where it comes from, that alone would be such useful information. Could this actually be a virus that operates through System Services?