This is the hilarious moment a man screamed ‘Hey Siri’ to find his phone that was lost under snow in northeastern China.

The man was having a snowball fight with his friends when he dropped his smartphone in Shenyang City, Liaoning province on November 8. He was trying to locate the device by activating the virtual assistant and calling its name, hoping it would respond.

He said: ‘At first, my friends weren’t helping me find my phone, so I bribed them with some milk tea. We stood there in a row and called for Siri, but there was no answer, so we dug around in the snow.’

He added that they found the phone, which had shut down but was still functional, after 20 minutes.

Large parts of northern China, including the capital Beijing, have this month been hit by freezing temperatures and the first snowfall of the year. It has sparked highway closures and flight and train cancellations.

China’s National Meteorological Agency raised an orange blizzard warning – the second-highest in China’s four-tiered alert system – as snowfall of up to 12 inches is forecasted in the following days.

The Beijing Meteorological Bureau said the winter weather struck around a month earlier than usual. Temperatures on Sunday fell to some of their lowest for the period in the past decade.