If your Garmin watch faces keep crashing, you're not alone – and Garmin is working on it

Garmin users have been seeing crashes for months
A faulty firmware update is thought to be to blame
Garmin says a fix is coming, but we don’t know when

Pick up one of the best Garmin watches on the market, and you could reasonably expect to have many years of trouble-free, wrist-based computing ahead of you – but it seems many Garmin users are currently experiencing issues with crashing watch faces.

As per Tech-Issues Today and Android Police, these problems have been plaguing users for months, but have recently spread to more Garmin models. The random crashes apparently throw up an “IQ” logo on the screen with an orange exclamation mark, and then the watch stops working.

The Garmin Venu 3 and Garmin Forerunner 965 models are specifically mentioned, but it doesn’t seem as though any watch is safe. Based on the multiple posts that can be found on Reddit and the official Garmin forums, it looks as though this is now affecting a significant number of users.

According to the user reports, the general consensus is that some kind of buggy firmware update is to blame. It sounds like it breaks the method used by the Connect IQ platform to save data, which then crashes the smartwatch.

A fix is coming

Garmin Forerunner 965

The Garmin Forerunner 965 is one of the watches mentioned (Image credit: Future)

For the time being, all you can do if you’ve been affected by this is to restart your watch. This won’t permanently resolve the issue, and you may see continuing crashes after that, but there’s no other option right now.

One bit of good news is that Garmin is aware of what’s going on and is trying to do something about it, as per a reply to one of the complaints on Reddit. For now, we don’t have any sort of timeline about when an updated firmware version might roll out – which leaves users in a rather frustrating limbo.

It’s also a case of better late than never: one developer has apparently logged hundreds of thousands of crashes in their app since August. That’s a lot of annoying people using Garmin watches, and trying to save their fitness data to the watch only to have it fail and require a restart.

We’ve been consistently impressed with Garmin watches down the years, and they regularly feature on our list of the best smartwatches around – but these are the kind of problems that shouldn’t be happening.

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