index

It was Nov 15th. I fell asleep at 8 PM with my Mac mini still on. It was raining with a cool breeze outside — perfect sleeping weather.

At 1 AM, I woke up to Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” playing at full-blast.

The door made a little sound. I didn’t think much of it—figured the wind moved the mouse and woke my Mac. So I shut my PC down, and went back to sleep.

The morning after, my curiosity kicked in. There’s no way the wind moved my mouse.
I opened my browser history, and there was only that one log at 1.10 am. Nothing else.

It felt like my PC suddenly woke up while sleeping, and started playing a random Youtube video.

So, what really happened?

I’m new to macOS, so I went down the rabbit hole. After brainstorming with Claude, this is the most likely culprit (no, it was not the wind, or ghosts):

• Maintenance from Apple Intelligence, and Darkwake

  The system log from Mac’s Console app confirms my Mac woke up at 1 AM. After running pmset -g log | grep -E "2025-11-16 (00:|01:)", I found a maintenance wake request related to the Apple Intelligence Platform. I’ve never used Apple Intelligence, so I guess this is just routine maintenance (?).

  

  Scrolling down a bit, I also found something called DarkWake, which seems to be a maintenance script from MacOS (there are users complaining about similar issues on the Apple Forum)

  I also came across a Reddit comment which confirms that MacOS indeed does maintenance at night.

So, it seems my PC woke for the built-in maintenance script, automatically connected to Wi-fi, reloaded the browser (it’s not closed), and my browser resumed its Youtube session in one of the tabs.

Hopefully, case closed.
Lesson learned: Close YouTube tabs before bed, or even better, shut your PC down before bed.