Glitch has rendered my iPhone completely unusable

I'm not even sure how to restart with buttons or whatever. I just tell Siri to restart the phone, it asks me if I really want to, I say yes, and it restarts.

To force restart your iPhone, press the volume up, immediately the volume down key, then hold the lock button for 10 seconds.

This is very odd. Restarting with Siri should work if Siri responds. A force restart should in all cases work and I have had to resort to this when things have gotten stuck in a glitch. I am not sure how it is on an IPhone 16 but on my 14 all I do is ;oquicly press the up and then down volume buttons and then hold the lock button for a few seconds. If this does not work, try connecting it to a computer and reset the device. Wait with that though until you know you have to. I am not sure if this is a software or hardware issue but from what I can tell it is a software issue.

Unfortunately, I've experienced this myself. A force restart didn't work, nor did trying to get Siri's attention. Sadly, my only option was to let the phone die, as even toggling voiceover via iTunes didn't work.

If not and siri works, you should be able to turn off voiceover and then say something like, hey siri, turn on VoiceOver.

Having experienced this, I can confirm the phone will have volume, but is otherwise literally almost completely unresponsive. Sometimes I could get voiceover to respond, but only in so much as I get the there's nothing here bong sound. Literally nothing else worked.

If you can activate Siri, and can actually hear Siri, give Siri this command,
"unmute"
This will be without quotes, and without saying any other keywords.

The reason I am suggesting this is because Siri has the ability to, mute, and, unmute, media volume. This unfortunately includes VoiceOver speech volume.
So, my suggestion is to try using the, unmute, when you activate Siri, and hopefully you will get voice speech volume turn back up.

If restart does not work, go to setting, general and shutdown and turn phone on.

About a month ago on my iPhone 16 this happened to me also. I had to use Apple support to help me. I could not hear voice over at all, even though I knew it was running since I could hear the boundary reached sound. So I could not use the screen. I reset the phone and that didn’t help. I called Apple accessibility, by using Siri and that was all I could do because I could not put in my passcode. Even using the volume buttons didn’t help. They found out finally after being on tech-support for a while that all the settings of volume had been turned down and would not come up high enough to hear. Going into settings with help by sharing my screen, the tech and a sighted friend they were able to raise the volume of the default voice. Problem fixed.

For completeness you can try the following.
Three finger double tap to toggle speech to make sure it hasn't been turned off by accident
Triple click the lock button to turn voice over off then on again
Use Syri to turn voice over off then on again

Even if they don't help your current situation they're useful to know about.

This happened to me after an update.
I used a braille display to restart my phone, because I couldn't use siri because I needed to unlock the phone first. However, as you were using your phone when this happened, you should be able to ask siri to restart your device.
I hope you are able to resolve the issue. Just so you know, I reported the issue to Apple after it had happened to me.

@Holger Fiallo, the entire issue with this bug is that the phone becomes unusable, so you can't get to settings, or into any other app for that matter, to power it off.eiri doesn't respond either, making the phone nothing but a brick until it dies.

@Gloria, this sounds like a different issue than what's being described here.
In my case, my phone very clearly had volume. Using the action button I could turn voiceover on and off and I would hear speech to that extent, but nothing else really would work.
Even when toggling voiceover, it didn't fix the issue. It'd just launch right back into... whatever state it was in before.

I'm shocked (but glad) that worked. Maybe I wasn't fast enough?

It is literly upk, down, and power. You have to be quick. You'll get it but the only way is practice.

I have never heard of an iPhone 16e doing something like that. However, I can research this problem for you if you would like. I hope you get this problem, resolved sooner than later!