Why is DNS Services eating my cellular data?

[matsan]

Just checked my Cellular usage data and saw that in about a month the DNS service has consumed almost as much data as all iMessages combined! This can't be right? I have checked Apple Discussion Forums but couldn't find any real informative answers so I as the experts here!
I have restarted the iPhone several times during the two months of stats (for updates etc) and now running latest version of iOS. Not many apps installed.

 

[i-cubed]

Not a solution, but an example of even worse DNS Services data usage. Like you I would like to know what is going on.

 

[iStorm]

Are you sure these are monthly numbers? All of them (not just DNS Services) seem high to me to have been from a single month. The cellular data usage doesn't reset monthly along with your billing cycle...you would have to reset it yourself every month. You can see when it was last reset at the bottom of the previous screen.

FWIW, this is what mine looks like (last reset October 2021). I browse the web a lot and use apps that rely on the internet, so I think the usage makes sense in my case considering this was over a period of 20 months.

 

[i-cubed]

Are you sure these are monthly numbers? All of them (not just DNS Services) seem high to me to have been from a single month. The cellular data usage doesn't reset monthly along with your billing cycle...you would have to reset it yourself every month. You can see when it was last reset at the bottom of the previous screen.

FWIW, this is what mine looks like (last reset October 2021). I browse the web a lot and use apps that rely on the internet, so I think the usage makes sense in my case considering this was over a period of 20 months.

View attachment 2230606

I moved my account to another provider a few months ago. I'm not sure if it's a cumulative thing or not. But DNS calls are basically just text request and response, no graphics involved. It makes no sense to be consuming close to 2GBs of data for this. My messaging has pictures and videos so 1GB might be accurate. Something else going on here.

 

[pacalis]

So my systems services this WEEK was 42 GB including 7.8 GB of messaging, 8GB of push notifications and 5.3 GB of DNS services... Somethings not right.

 

[Apple_Robert]

The following article may be helpful.

https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/dns/what-is-dns/

 

[willybNL]

Somethings not right.

It indeed seems something isn’t right with the DNS measurement since a while on iOS Cellular / Mobile data.

A while back I started noticing that every time I installed an iOS update at least 40MB of DNS traffic was added. Though my provider didn’t count in what they showed that I was using. So I left it at that.

Since then, I completely wiped this iPhone SE 3. Someone else in the family (even with different apple id) stated using it with another cellular company (provider) that has mobile data disabled (and I disabled mobile data in iOS too).

Yesterday, after helping installing iOS 26.2, I noticed mobile data was enabled all of the sudden. 400MB of DNS data was counted on the phone. Also this provider didn’t count it, as there is no mobile data plan.

So my conclusion would be there is for sure some bug.

Note. The iPhone is pretty much a clean iOS 26 install for now. No VPN or adblockers installed.