What do you do when your Apple Watch is frozen and won’t restart forced or otherwise?

Just charged my watch but now stuck on grid view screen. Will not switch off

"If you can’t turn off your Apple Watch or if the problem continues, you may need to force your Apple Watch to restart. Do this only if you’re unable to restart your Apple Watch. To force restart, hold down the side button and the Digital Crown at the same time for at least ten seconds, until the Apple logo appears."

Restart Apple Watch - Apple Support

Here is a solution from forum member dadosnake that worked for him.

dadosnake

User level:Level 1

(4 points)

Apple WatchSpeciality level out of ten: 0

Eventually, I found a workaround that gave me the opportunity to reset my Apple Watch, and I want to share more info in this post as it may help other people that are facing the same bug:

As manual hard reset won't work, the only solution that worked for me was pushing the Apple Watch to force an hard reset.

The only way to push the Apple Watch to force an hard reset is to fail to insert the passcode on purpose for too many times. As you may notice, after a certain number of login attempts the Apple Watch will ask you to wait for a number of minutes that will increase fail after fail.

My Apple Watch was forced to start a hard reset after failing a dozen login attempts. For your information, your last login attempt should be after waiting for 60 minutes after the last passcode failure.

After failing to insert the right pin code for the last time, Apple Watch initiated the hard reset automatically, and it was finally possible for me to pair my Watch with my new iPhone.

I hope this information will help you.

Posted on Jan 4, 2021 2:25 PM

I think a visit to an Apple store might be best.