My Apple Watch 9 is acting weird - Is this a bug?

Hold down both of the buttons on the right side of the watch for 15-20 seconds. When you let go, the watch will restart and should be back to normal.

Same here I turn on my Apple Watch and I see this random arrow I search it up and apple tells me to reboot it I do so and it starts calling 911.

I also did the reboot as suggested by Apple - it fixed it for about a day - when I sent it in for repair it was working fine - also bought in December 2023.

Thank you mjanelle4…this corrected my issue!

I can't believe it is now May 17 and people are still reporting their watch is going bonkers. And not a word from Apple!!! Shame. What are people doing who don't know about Apple Discussions page?

I just experienced the same issue with my watch series 9. Feb 2nd

I removed it so luckily it did not call 911.

After hard restarting it started working normally again. After a few minutes I noticed a notification regarding watchOS 10.3 update.

The same happened to me right now and I googled and found this post and signed in to share here.

Sunday, Feb 4th, 2024

Apple Watch started to jump and navigate to different screens and open Apple Music, and Browser and ask for location permission. I could not stop it from acting weird. Eventually started texting my husband, and calling 911.

I tried force reboot and again repeated all this!

I put my phone in Flight mode and then rebooted the watch again to resolve the issue.

I have videos of the event as evidence!!

This just happened to me, watch went crazy, then my iPhone too! Watch kept calling 911 and I couldn’t stop it. Rebooted my phone. I was so freaked out my boyfriend suggested unpairing my watch. Did that then paired again. All has been fine for a while, but the fact it happened with my iPhone too, very concerning. What’s going on?

Happened to me last night, freaked me out! Oddly same exact thing happened with my iPhone too, at the same time, it was crazy! Phone was easier to turn off. Apple needs to answer to this, what’s going on?!

You’ve just described word for what what my watch just did in Lidl !!! I was so embarrassed the emergency sos alarm was sounding it text my Mum and called 999!! I apologised profusely to the lady and had to convince her I wasn’t being murdered or assaulted. I couldn’t turn it off and it kept entering numbers on the pin code

After the 3 hours were you able to put your passcode in and unlock your watch? Every time I try it starts the 3 hrs over. I’m getting so frustrated! I can’t do the update on my watch without entering the passcode but the stupid watch won’t let me enter it. I’ve tried the hard reboot many times, it does nothing. Just starts the 3 hrs over again. I put it on the charger and it’s fully charged.

This exact same thing happened to me around 3am PST Feb 6th, 2024. Woke me out of a dead sleep with some loud alarm sound. Then when I looked at my watch it was as though someone had hacked into my watch - or was trying to - and the screen was going crazy between trying to enter in all these different wrong passcodes and all my apps, and trying to call 911. I wasn’t able to stop the screen craziness no matter what I did, until I hard rebooted my watch (pressing & holding both buttons together on the side for 10 seconds until I saw the apple icon). But then it wouldn’t let me try to enter my passcode to unlock my watch and kept giving me 3 hrs wait times to attempt to log in. I finally had to call Apple Support and thank God I did because they knew exactly how to fix it. The lady had to lead me through how to unpair the watch from my iPhone, do both the update for my iPhone and my watch, and then restore everything back onto my watch (basically wipe it and then put everything back on) after the update installed. Oh, and P.S., the watch update install and pairing back to my iPhone process took over an hour, where this lady had to remote access my iPhone and help me through the process and then sit on the phone with me while all this downloaded and installed. What a pain in the butt. She also said “the Apple Engineers are working on whatever is causing this but we are calling it ‘ghost watch’.” Just an FYI for whoever this happens to next that needs to follow this process. But now that all that is done, my watch is back to working properly.