macOS 13.3 - USB devices become unusable after a few hours

Just wanted to pile on and say that I am seeing this problem as well. I see it probably 3-4 days a week on my work machine. I have an Intel i7 16-inch 2019 Macbook Pro, and this problem started sometime around the 13.2 or 13.3 release.

It most commonly manifests as a failure to wake up from sleep, with the display staying off. Sometimes it occurs while I am actively using the machine. makequeues taking 100% CPU is a surefire symptom of the problem. If I kill makequeues, the machine immediately locks up hard.

I have a yubikey plugged into USB, and a CalDigit TS3 Plus plugged in via thunderbolt. The TS3 has built-in ethernet (attached via thunderbolt) and an SD card reader and audio interface (attached via USB). In addition, hanging off ports from that I have connected a second display (DisplayPort), an iPhone 12 (USB), and a audio technica mic (USB). This dock also delivers power to the laptop.

With the dock, I am connected to my network via both ethernet and wifi, with ethernet is the primary interface. I've noticed that when my machine fails to wake up, I can still ping it over wifi, but not ethernet. In console and dmesg logs, it looks like there are networking-related buffers filled up and various actions failing due to lack of space. It's been unclear to me if that's a cause or a symptom.

I can ssh into the machine over the wifi interface, and sure enough, I see makequeues using 100% CPU. It doesn't appear that anything I do in terms of disconnecting devices can make it recover at that point. A power off is the only way out.

I haven't tried unplugging things individually yet, but when I unplug the dock entirely I don't seem to see the hang the following morning, but I don't have enough data points to feel confident in this. It seems like it's not a definitive device that's causing the problem for folks.

For those of you seeing this, are you all on Intel macs? Or do Apple silicon macs have this problem too?

I've had a similar issue with Bluetooth on a Mac Studio with a Studio Display, after updating to 13.3. In my case, what happens is that my non-Apple Bluetooth devices, while still functioning properly, are displayed as 'Not Connected' in System Settings. Also I can no longer use my mouse and keyboard on my iPad by 'pushing through' the edge of my monitor onto the iPad screen, and the iPad no longer appears in the Display settings. Finally, my Apple Watch will no longer unlock the Mac once it has gone into screen saver mode, and I must manually enter the password. The only way I've been able to restore these functions, has been to plug in an old, corded keyboard and mouse, then turn off Bluetooth, restart the computer, and turn Bluetooth back on. But the problem reoccurs after shutting down the computer for the night, and restarting the next morning.

I was able to get a ps -ef to run while experiencing the hang in progress. The exact call to makequeues is:

/System/Library/SystemConfiguration/PrinterNotifications.bundle/Contents/MacOS/makequeues -z

You can run this manually when system is working normally.

Part of the output of this command is information on all attached USB devices - so I guess that is the connection with USB. I don't know whether high CPU in makequeues is the cause of the hang we're seeing or whether it is a symptom (caused by it trying to interrogate USB devices which have gone into a strange state).

Still not really any closer to understanding what is going on here. The lack of errors in logs - and the fact that you only have a minute to poke about before the system becomes unusable makes it pretty tough to debug.

I did notice last time that even when everything else was hung, the zoom call I was on still worked (minus USB camera). It's certainly a strange state the system gets into when this problem is occurring.

I also tried an SMC reset, NVRAM reset, and deleted the printer I had configured (since "makequeues" was implicated). That was looking promising: no crashes for 4 days, which was an improvement over what I had been seeing previously, but I just had one again.

This issue began occurring on my work MacBook Pro since the 13.3.1(a).

No external hard drives, but keyboard and mouse.

Our company support has recommended numerous solutions (e.g. resetting NVRAM/PRAM, etc), but the problem persists. Updating to 13.4 now.

Spoke too soon. The removal of (a) resulted in preventing the the problem from occurring when the system is left idle over just one night (i.e. used during the day on both days straddling the overnight), but it does recur if the system is left on and idle over a weekend. Same behavior in 13.4.

Thanks for your response.

You are quite right, could still be glitchy. Ruling out hardware will help you and Apple get to the bottom of it though!

Thanks for the response!