Apple Watch Battery Draining suddenly after Software Update

My watch is acting this way and it's not even on watchOS 10.4! I'm still on the old OS, but new iOS. Seems to be hit or miss. My husband has the updated iOS, old watchOS, but his watch is holding charge as normal. So weird!

Same. After the phone update suddenly Watch went to 10%! Charged it up and then 3 hours later it’s at 10% again! Yes and the update is stuck on preparing. So glad of this forum was thinking I’d have to take it back, it was brand new in January. Hope this gets fixed asap, it’s too expensive to not be useable!!!

I have been having the same issues as others are describing. Woke up to a dead watch even though it was fully charged 8 hours prior, charged it to 100% and it was down to less than 10% four hours later. Charged it again and tried to get it to update and it has been “preparing” with the watch attached to the charger, and charging while waiting for the update to finish. I got tired of waiting so I started wearing my watch again. Within an hour it lost 15% battery life.

So glad to find I'm not the only one! Mine somehow depletes super fast during the night. I charge it to 100% before I sleep, put it on and it's already red in the morning. Normally it would last another day or two.

Same problem for me. Watch has had to be charged 3 times today.

update gets stuck on preparing, and when I delete the downloaded update it’s over a gig even tho the update said it was 700mb.

tried resetting the watch but makes no difference

Upgraded my iOS on my phone last night and my watch battery this morning was instantly toast.

I've also noticed that it is taking a VERY long time to charge.

I put on my watch at 11am and it was dead by 4pm.

I’m having the same problem. I just spent 57 minutes on the phone with Apple Support. They ran diagnostics and got nothing. He said he hasn’t heard of anyone having this problem. However, I’m sure plenty of people have called. He said I have to take this POS watch to the Apple Store. Of course they don’t have any appointments for two days. No more Apple products for me.

Ridiculous! How is it possible that we are all having the same experience?? It's not possible! Our watches were perfect prior to this update and they want to fix the watch-and they call themselves geniuses!

I updated my phone to iOS 17.4.1 yesterday and suddenly my watch (series 9) battery stopped functioning normally. I usually charge it every 2nd day unless I use it to record a couple of workouts. Now I’m barely getting a few hours. The watch is less than I year old. I rely on it for my alarm too. Imagine my surprise when I charged it to full at 10pm only to wake at 4.20am to find it barely hanging on. A fix would be welcome.

My watch would get warm from charging and get stuck @ 50%, I would have remove from charge, wait few minutes for the watch to cool down, then put it back on the charger, repeat few times before the watch would charge to 100%. After 100% charge, watch would be dead within 5-6 hours, and I used to charge my watch every other day. Can't even update it, update is stuck on my phone, tried to restart it, doesn't do anything

This worked for my wife’s Apple Watch too - battery retaining charge now. Haven’t attempted the update again though - will wait to see what develops. I’ve messaged Apple Support on X to alert them to what’s going on & have pointed them to this thread. Fingers crossed!

My phone updated to 17.4.1 IOS Wednesday night and charged my watch like normal Thursday and after only 4 hours it was dead. I changed nothing about how I normally use my phone or my watch. Then on Friday I had to charge my watch 3 time and it was at 100% when I went to bed and dead before I even got up this morning. Apple please fix this. I can’t carry around a charger and battery pack everywhere!

I´m having EXACTLY the same problem! - battery goes from fully charged to 0% in about 3 hours! - I can´t even update my Watch (7 series) because the update gets stuck on "preparing".

The watch is unusable until a fix comes along.

Very frustrating!

Same issue. I lose about 20% battery every hour, and it’s dead before lunch. Prior to that it lasted over a day.

This is for a series 9 I bought a couple months ago.

Even with AppleCarew they’re telling me it ‘passed diagnostics’ and so it’s not covered.

Hopefully there’s a software update coming soon that solves it.

updated the iPhone to 17.4.1 and Apple Watch suddenly started draining in say 4 hours.

updated the watch( charge must be above 50%) to 10.4 yet the problem persists.

apple engineers are not performing quality checks.