You dropped your phone, and Face ID stopped working. The screen is intact, the phone turns on, but facial recognition no longer works. It's a familiar story. Customers bring phones with this issue to us regularly, and the situation is almost always the same: it took a fall, they picked it up, everything seemed fine—and then they noticed that face unlock wasn't working.

Why Face ID is so sensitive to drops

Face ID isn't just a camera. It's an entire module: an infrared camera, a proximity sensor, a dot projector, and a flood illuminator. All of this is packed into a small cutout at the top of the screen—the Dynamic Island on newer models or the classic notch on older ones. Upon impact, any of these components can shift or get damaged, even if the phone looks completely fine on the outside.

Most often, the dot projector takes the hit—a tiny component that casts an invisible grid of 30 000 dots onto your face. It's this very grid that lets your iPhone recognize you. If the projector fails or simply gets misaligned, Face ID stops working completely, even though everything else continues to function normally.

What usually breaks

In our experience, the causes fall into several categories:

  • Damage to the Face ID ribbon cable—the flexible cable connecting the module to the logic board can tear or come loose from its connector upon impact.
  • Dot projector misalignment or breakage—mechanical damage from an impact, especially if the phone lands on a corner near the cutout.
  • Infrared camera damage—less common, but it does happen, especially on iPhone 12 and 13 models after side impacts.
  • Loose connector on the motherboard—sometimes the module itself is intact, but the connection to the board has been broken.

We had a case where a customer brought in an iPhone 13 Pro that had fallen onto asphalt from about a meter high. The screen didn't crack thanks to a protective glass, but Face ID wasn't working at all. We opened it up—the dot projector had shifted by literally half a millimeter from its mount. After carefully setting it back in place, everything worked again. That's why you shouldn't panic right away and assume replacement is inevitable.

What you can try yourself

There aren't many options, and none involve opening up the phone at home. But there are a few things worth checking before heading to a service center.

  1. Restart the phone. It sounds basic, but sometimes after an impact, the system glitches and stops recognizing the module. A regular restart can fix this.
  2. Check for dirt or dust in the camera cutout. A drop can sometimes dislodge fine debris that ends up blocking the sensors.
  3. Go to Settings → Face ID & Passcode, reset Face ID, and set it up again. If the module works but the settings got corrupted, this will help.
  4. Update iOS if you haven't in a while. While rare, sometimes after a restart, the system needs an update to properly initialize the module.

Another real example: an iPhone 14 was brought in after Face ID stopped working when it fell in the car from a phone holder. We asked the customer to simply restart the phone and set up Face ID again first. It worked. Apparently, the proximity sensor had temporarily lost contact, and the reboot restored initialization. So don't rush straight to a repair shop.

When you definitely need a technician

If restarting and resetting Face ID didn't help, there's nothing more you can do on your own. Face ID is strictly paired to the motherboard of that specific phone. This is by design: you can't just take a new module and swap it in—the iPhone won't accept an unlinked scanner. Re-pairing can only be done using specialized equipment, and that's a job for a repair center.

An important point: don't take a phone like this to just any random shop. An unqualified technician might tear the ribbon cable while opening the device, turning a simple "misaligned sensor" into a "component replacement required" issue. Face ID repair is delicate work. The cost, depending on the model, ranges from 2 500 to 6 000 рублей, and turnaround is most often same-day.

If none of the above helped, come visit iClub at 35 Kommunisticheskaya St. Diagnostics are free—a technician will take a look and tell you right away what happened and how much it will cost.