Apple Watch Stuck on the Wrong Time? Here’s the Easy Fix
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Folks around most of North America woke up on Sunday morning to find the time on their Apple devices had automatically moved back an hour — or at least they should have.
For some, the time change happened so seamlessly that they could have forgotten about it entirely. That was certainly the situation I found myself in until I walked into my kitchen and looked at the microwave, still showing the original time. Then, I strapped on my Apple Watch and found that it was similarly confused.
There seems to be a particularly unusual glitch in watchOS 27.2 that’s causing the wearable to fail to show the clock change on the Always On display. It’s both strange and surreal, especially if you’re using an analog watch face, as the little hand skips an hour back every time you raise your wrist.
At first, I thought it was just me, but it turns out this problem is more widespread. Reports have popped up on Reddit and X, complete with video clips illustrating the problem.
The good news is the fix isn’t actually that difficult. I figured it out myself last night just by poking around: swap to a different watch face and the problem goes away. Not only won’t it occur on the new face, but you can switch right back to your original watch face and everything will be just peachy.
Unsurprisingly, rebooting the Apple Watch also fixes the problem, and apparently simply waiting until midnight does as well. Apple actually posted a support document on Friday — likely because Europe already “fell back” last weekend — listing these specific solutions:
If your Apple Watch is showing incorrect time on its Always On display after daylight saving time changes, try either of these things:
Switch to any other watch face, then switch back to your preferred watch face.
Restart your Apple Watch.
If you do nothing, the issue will resolve itself at midnight following the time change.
The support document also notes that this is purely a cosmetic issue with the Always On display and doesn’t impact features like alarms. That makes sense, as the Apple Watch definitely seems to know what time it is in every other mode, but it’s sort of disconcerting to realize that the Always On display isn’t simply a mirror of whatever is shown on the live watch face (and it gets us to thinking of other clever things Apple could do here if it wanted to).
This is reminiscent of another issue that you may have noticed if you switch watch faces frequently: the Apple Watch always reverts to 10:09 when moving to a new face. That’s the time used in Apple Watch ads as a subtle nod to traditional analog watches, which have always placed the hands at 10:10 in marketing photos to frame the brand logo. Apple’s choice of 10:09 is believed by many to be its subtle and slightly cheeky way of saying it’s ahead of the curve — a trick first used by Timex years earlier, which specifically used 10:09:36 (Apple uses 10:09:30, naturally).
The movement of the hands to those positions (or the digital time showing 10:09) when changing watch faces is largely a matter of the default placeholder showing up before the face updates, but it’s still another one of those odd little quirks in Apple’s wearable.
