Apple TV 4K 3rd Gen — Boot Loop (SOLVED: It was the remote!)

You saved my day!

I have the same ATV model, tvOS 17.1 (21K69) as well and same remote firmware. My wife sat on the remote without realizing for about 30 seconds, and the show my daughter was watching suddenly lost video and the Apple TV showed the Apple logo while still playing the show's audio. A few seconds after that, the Apple TV went into a boot loop.

I placed the remote out of range and the Apple TV was able to fully boot up. As soon as I brought the remote back within range, the Apple TV went into a boot loop. I reset the remote with TV button + Volume Down and everything went back to normal.

I agree this may be an edge case, but fortunately it has a solution.

Thanks!

Whoa this is a crazy bug. I accidentally sat on the remote for some time today. I didnt think anything about it but noticed my apple TV 4k 2nd gen would reboot and try to recover it self constantly. I thought it was just bricked. I went to the store to buy another one and crazy thing is it caused that one to fail as well!! I was baffled. I also saw my tv remote was having some odd issues where to would not turn my tv off or on. I thought maybe the remote i sat on is spamming out commands causing issues. So I tossed it in the garage sure enough TV remote was working normally and all of a sudden the new Apple tv booted fine. I brought the remote back in just to make sure I wasn’t crazy and once in range it brought back the boot issues. That remote currently has the power to brick apple TV’s. Crazy. My 2nd gen is done for. It tried to recover to many times its fully corrupt cause of that remote.

Another "edge" case here. I don't know of anything odd happening to remote. Just found it could not control volume of JBL sound bar. Investigating things I found the Apple logo bootloop. This post saved me.

Reset the remote. (Didn't even know that was possible and could there not be at least one LED on this thing ?!?)

All good again with ATV.

Thank you!

ATV 4k 3rd generation

tvOS 17.2 (21K365)

This has got to be one of the most obscure issues I’ve come across with my ATV. About a month ago, after having some audio/visual issues with our primary ATV, it went into the boot loop. I tried most of the troubleshooting advise I could find and realized I was about a month away from warranty so immediately scheduled a genius appointment and stopped searching for a solution. The Apple Genius couldn’t do much diagnosing and initiated a replacement quickly. Hooked the new unit up, and all seemed good, until today. For some reason the tv volume continued to turn up to max intermittently. At first I actually thought maybe my neighbor had bought a new tv (a cause of a long ago issue), but quickly ruled it out as I could see the IR receiver going nuts on the TV. I quickly forced a reboot and of course, I’m back in the loop. I’m lucky this seem to be the first result to my search this time and it seems to have all worked itself out once I did a remote reboot 💁🏼‍♂️. Thank you for the help!

I just ran into this bug by accident after putting the Apple Remote in my pocket, laying on it and then taking it out. I have a bunch of Apple TV devices around house so I grabbed a few and every one of them resulted in this boot loop behavior. By chance my kids had taken all the remotes out of the room while playing. The Apple TV started working fine and then my wife told kids to put the remotes back and as soon as my daughter walked in the room the Apple TV immediately started boot looping again. This is when I realized it must be a remote and went through process of bringing each remote into room until I figured out which one was causing reboot loop. This affected 1st gen and 2nd gen Apple TV 4K devices.

tvOS version: 17.2

remote fw shows: 0x83

Exactly the same issue!! I even called support and booked in a slot with genius bar.

after moving the Apple TV to another room to re-test without having the remote it worked. The SECOND we brought the remote into the room it went into boot loop.

moved the Apple TV back into the living room, plugged it in, again it worked fine. When the remote came back in… boom, boot loop.

ive since paired an older remote as haven’t yet tried rebooting the faulted one and its all working fine!

This issue has now happened to me with two unique remotes, both the USB-C and Lightning connector aluminum remotes. I ended up using TV+volume down to solve, as even unpairing the remote from the settings did not stop the boot loop. I’m just going to use the remote app on my phone until they resolve this software/firmware issue.

Time saver! Solved this problem in about 4m thanks to this post.

Reboot AppleTV. Nope.

Disconnect/reconnect HDMI. Nope.

Power cycle Tv. Nope.

Sat on couch to determine which low hanging fruit test to execute next.

Searched. Found post.

Reset remote. Solved!

OP, state your favorite charity and I’ll make a donation in your name!

Same happened to me with my ATV HD model, unpairing and pairing the remote helped me solve this issue.

You saved me a trip to the Apple Store!!

Thank you for this post. It 1000% resolve my issue (putting the remote in microwave while ATV did it's restore). After, the ATV finally booted up successfully. I took the remote out the microwave and it was at 0% battery ...very odd, it did have a charge the night before. Plugging it into a charger and it reconnected to ATV and appears to be working fine. Perhaps the glitch in the remote caused the battery to drain.

This was great.

My specific issue was that only the Apple TV was non-responsive, so I went for the hard reboot just to get caught in a loop.

For me, massaging the remote buttons got me through.

Thank you so much for this detailed write up. I was having the same issue verbatim, and for whatever god forsaken reason, doing the ATV remote-restart/reset fixed everything and now the ATV works perfectly.

thank you!!!!

Legend! put in the microwave and fixed! Followed by recharge of the remote. I think the remote being dead also had something to do with it. Can confirm that a series of buttons were unintentionally pressed after being sat on to cause the issue. Canceled my appointment at Apple.

What a beast. As a QA engineer, I have much respect for your edge case find and reporting in the thread.