My first major problem with my iPhone 5s, and it's a doozie

[Lydia Leftcoast]

When I wake up in the morning, the first thing I do is use my iPhone to find out if any e-mail from Japan has come in that needs to be answered immediately. (For those who don't know, I'm a J>E translator with about half my clients in Japan.)

So this morning, first my G-Mail and then my local ISP's mail were unobtainable. I thought at first that maybe Comcast was having one of it's all-too-frequent outages, so I tried cellular data, but that didn't work any better, and besides, wifi worked just fine with my computer. Safari worked for a while and then didn't. Then I found that none of my apps (such as the day's weather and radar) would update from yesterday. Facebook worked for a while, alone of all the apps that download data, and then it stopped working, too.

However, the phone function worked. (I called my landline.)

I thought I'd better reinstall Safari or do the long-postponed update, but when I tried plugging the phone into the computer, iTunes would not recognize it.

Has my iPhone bricked? If so, why?

[Lydia Leftcoast]

1. I looked up the topic on Apple's website, and i'm following instructions for restoring

Fortunately, my data are backed up to the computer.

[hlthe2b]

2. Maybe your phone tried to auto-update IOS 8 and got stuck.

Since you had wifii enabled, that is possible, if you have your settings set to allow for auto-download.

I had something like this happen when I tried to update a major IOS change on my old iphone4... Auto restore did the trick, but of course it took hours to get everthing uploaded and the phone back completely.

I'm holding off updating my iphone 5s to IOS 8 for just these kind of reasons. From what I've read, all looks positive so far (except it takes a LOT of storage space), but still, it is a major change.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

3. Everything is now up and running

The instructions on Apple's website actually worked.

I don't have auto-update turned on, so I'm puzzled. At first I thought that Safari had a bug, because the web-based apps went haywire first. But when the computer stopped recognizing the phone, that's when I knew something strange was happening.

The Apple site didn't explain why this happened, but it must happen enough that they thought it worth providing instructions.