Siri says ‘Torch Not Available’ when asked to turn on flashlight after iOS 26 update

Here’s what I’ve found after my testing attempt. If the phone is on a surface, just about every single time Siri will state the flashlight isn’t available. When I pick up the phone and ask for the flashlight to be turned on- it works.

In another test while just simply holding the phone as I normally would like picking it up to walk from one room to another, it took FIVE attempts before Siri would turn on the flashlight. The first four times….. “sorry, it’s not available.”

Looking this up in Google, the common causes:

low battery—doesn’t apply in this case.

camera in use — doesn’t apply

software bug—well, that’s the only thing left

The issue here is that BEFORE iOS 26, I could ask Siri to turn on the flashlight and 100% of the time it would work.

Now at random times, it does NOT work. The ONLY change was updating the software. Asking Siri to turn on the flashlight worked before so it should stand to reason that it would still work correctly now, but it doesn’t.

iPhone 16 pro max is the phone I’m working with.