Can people with no service & dying battery still change voicemail greeting? Fact Check

Messages on social media claim that if lost or stranded, you can change your voicemail greeting message to provide instructions on where to find you, even if your phone is “low on juice or has no signal.”

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An example of the claim on social media can be seen below.

If you are ever lost while hiking, get stranded with a broken down car, etc and you notice your cell phone is either low on juice or has no signal, here is a tip that very well may save your life. Change the voicemail on your phone to a message that gives your approximate location, the time, the date, your situation (lost, out of gas, car broken down, injured, etc) and any special instructions such as you are staying with the car, you are walking toward a town, etc…. The best part of this is that even if your cell phone dies or stops working, voicemail still works, so anyone calling your phone looking for you will hear the message and know where to find or where to send help.

The message above makes two fundamental claims, one which is true and the other false.

What’s true?

The true claim is that you can change your voicemail greeting even if your phone battery is low. It is perhaps of little surprise that this is true, since there would be no reason to place any type of “battery level limit” on when a user can change their voicemail greeting.

However many have questioned the logic of doing this when lost or stranded with a very low battery. Advice from authorities generally instead urges someone call 911 or to text 911 and offer as much information as you can about your location. Both of these are quicker and would use less battery power than the comparatively more laborious process of changing your voicemail message.

At this point, one may point out that if a person also has no phone signal, and as such calling or texting 911 is not possible, then would changing your voicemail become a practical solution. The answer is no, and we explain below.

What’s false?

And that’s because despite the claims in the message, you cannot change your voicemail if you have no phone (or Internet) signal (we assume here of course that someone stranded will not have access to Wi-Fi, an Internet connection, another cellular phone with a signal or a landline – if such things are available, a person could potentially use all of them to change their voicemail greeting, but the conundrum is rendered moot since all of those things can more easily be used to get help directly.)

Voicemail greetings are generally stored on data servers belonging to your phone operator. In order to change it, you need to be able to access those data servers, and with no signal, a person cannot do this.

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With some corrections, this can still be a helpful tip…

Perhaps this piece of advice has had the social media “pass it on whispers” treatment applied, and some of its meaning or clarity has become somewhat lost in translation.

A common piece of advice for those venturing into the wilderness where phone signals and battery charging stations may be lacking is to change your voicemail before you set off, while you still have ample battery power and phone signal. This way, if a person does become unstuck, their voicemail may provide helpful and potentially life-saving information as to a person’s location.

(Of course it is also recommended to always let friends and family know where you are heading if you do go somewhere without phone signal as well.)

These points aren’t made clear in the message above, perhaps because of the aforementioned social media treatment, and could perhaps lead to someone taking the advice at face value and subsequently wasting precious phone resources trying to change their voicemail when they have no phone signal, which of course will not work.

We rank this claim as “mixture” and if you do want to spread this tip, we recommend correcting it to make it clear that changing a voicemail message is perhaps a good idea before a person sets off on a potentially hazardous trip.