Is Your New Apple Watch Spontaneously Rebooting? The watchOS 27.0.1 Fix is Here

Not long after the Apple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4 went on sale on Friday, reports began pouring in that some folks were encountering spontaneous reboots when performing seemingly normal operations.

While the problem didn’t seem to affect everyone (I didn’t encounter it, although I also updated to the watchOS 27.2 beta within the first 24 hours after setting up my new Series 12), it was widespread enough that Apple has now issued a quick fix in the form of watchOS 27.0.1.

This update is available exclusively for the Apple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4, so don’t be surprised if you don’t see it show up on your older wearables. That’s because the update seemingly exists to fix one specific problem, as outlined in the release notes:

If there are other bug fixes involved here, we have to assume they’re either exclusive to the new models, or that Apple will eventually push out a watchOS 27.0.1 update for older devices. However, it’s equally likely that it might just skip past that to watchOS 27.0.2 or beyond.

In fact, we’re not even sure if we’ll ever see watchOS 27.1. In what’s likely an attempt to keep everything aligned, Apple has already moved on to the beta cycle for watchOS 27.2, matching iOS 27.2, an incremented version number that skips over 27.1, which appears to be exclusive to the new iPhone Duo. Apple has done the same with iPadOS 27.2, macOS 27.2, tvOS 27.2, and visionOS 27.2.

Unsurprisingly, there are no security fixes in watchOS 27.0.1, which means there’s no urgency to rush out and install it if you’re not having any problems. However, if you’ve been finding your shiny new Apple Watch unexpectedly restarting, then there’s a good chance watchOS 27.0.1 has the fix.

According to multiple reports on Reddit, many folks found their Apple Watch Series 12 or Apple Watch Ultra 4 models rebooting when performing numerous activities, including calling up Siri AI, editing watch faces, making calls, opening Apple Maps, and recording workouts. While most people only encountered the problem when actively using their wearables, there were some reports of the new Apple Watch models rebooting when idle.

A post on the Apple Support Community noted by AppleInsider suggests the underlying cause of the problem was a Neural Engine timeout where a command was taking too long to process, exceeding a limit that caused the device to assume the process was hung and reboot to recover itself.

Since the Apple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4 both shipped with watchOS 27.0, there was no way for users to roll back to an earlier version. While Apple support techs offered a few potential workarounds, nothing actually fixed the random reboots until watchOS 27.0.1 came along.

It’s unclear if the current watchOS 27.2 betas have the same issue, but if so, this will presumably be addressed in a future beta — and certainly by the time watchOS 27.2 is released to the public next month.