iOS 10 Black Screen Spinning Wheel

I awoke to find my wife at the kitchen table telling me her iPhone 6 suddenly gives her a black screen with the spinning spiked wheel after only a couple minutes of use. She never had the problem until today. Her iPhone 6 runs iOS11. There's a red circle with a 1 in it above the Settings icon, and when we tap that, we tap Apple ID, but when she tries to login (yes, PSW is correct), nothing happens. Then a minute later the black screen and spinning wheel appear again. As others have said, this makes the phone totally unusable.

I myself have an iPhone 7 running iOS 11.1.2 and I have not yet experienced this problem. Then again, my wife said she never experienced the problem until today, so who knows what happens next. Her phone is on SoftBank here in Japan and mine is on the AU network, if that matters.

And yes, she typed her SN in the following page but it said hers is a 2016 model that should not be affected by the bad battery problem:

iPhone 6s Program for Unexpected Shutdown Issues - Apple Support

No, we've not tried restarting or other tricks others have reported in this thread, mainly because they don't seem to be working for other people. That's why we've not done the hassle of a full restore either. But the problem happens even when the Lightning cable is connected and charging the iPhone -- even if she uses it while charging, it still gives her the black screen and spinning wheel after only a couple minutes. Her iPhone 6 is 1.5 years old.

Thoughts?

It's due to a date bug (Dec 2nd) causing local notifications to crash Springboard. For some people, Headspace is the only app they use with local notifications so deleting that was a work around. It won't work by itself if you have other apps with local notifications. Installing iOS 11.2 is the correct solution.

Link to official support page:

If your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch unexpectedly restarts - Apple Support

Oh my goodness!! I love you you! I needed to write you my most sincere appreciation!

I was very concerned when this happened and after fretting for 1.5 hours and trying nearly everything under the sun, including but not limited to the self destruct option--plugging it in, and quickly unplugging it, hoping something would trigger the phone out of the spinning wheel of death coma, (NOT recommended unless you want to spend days restoring) I finally decided to google it.

You are amazing. It worked immediately. I only needed the first 3 steps. I hope you get many rave reviews & awards for your answer because this is the first time I have ever googled something and it was fixed in under 30 seconds. There was no banter/difficult terminology to weed through it simply worked.

Thank you so much!

You are amazing!

-Sincerely, (a very happy, no longer white wheel of spinning death, iphone owner)

Jen

Worked like a charm. My iPhone 7+ hung at spinning wheel, and nothing could get it back up. So googled for an answer and found this solution. What helped me was "Hold down the POWER button plus the VOLUME DOWN button SIMULTANEOUSLY. If it works, the screen should power off almost immediately." Phone back up and running. Thanks for the tip! 😉

I have an iPhone 7 Plus and I had this same issue and tried steps 1-3 (after trying everything you had already tried also) and it immediately restarted! I didn't even have to plug it up to my computer. Thank you for this advice!!

I don't use Outlook at all and this black screen spinning white wheel issue is now happening approximately once an hour! It has increased in occurrence over the last few days. It lasts for about 10 seconds, then asks me to type my pin back in and all seems ok again..until it does it again...driving me insane

I had this problem and it got increasingly worse, showing the black screen/wheel for about 15 seconds almost every hour.

I contacted Apple and reluctantly did what they said - backup and restore the entire phone (wiping the entire thing), and so far it seems to have worked.

I did the restore via iTunes. Takes a while but worth it to fix the problem.

Hope this helps others.

This keeps happening to me, every other day or so...I have an iPhone 6s. I’ll be in the middle of reading something, or writing a text, FB post or note, and it’ll restart, the spinning wheel will show for a few seconds, and then I it comes back on, only to realize I’ve lost what I was doing (lost a draft work email the other day...******!). At first I thought it was because I was playing Pandora in the background (too many apps or something), but it’s also been happening without Pandora on. Please fix...I’m at my wits end with this phone. Partner has a 7 and same thing has happened. What’s the incentive to upgrade to a 7, 8 or X if it’s gonna be buggy?

Thankkkkkkk youuuuu, this helped me so much. My phone completely froze then turned to the black screen for a full hour. So i just started to freak out, then i found hid cite off my computer and it worked instantly. I didn't expect that to work but it really did. Make sure you follow the list of things to do. It really did work

I've tried all of the suggested solutions...still happening!!! Happens if I'm using Pandora, happens while I'm using GoogleMaps in the car (very inconvenient), happens when I'm typing a text or messaging through FB Messenger...I'm at my wits end with this phone and seriously considering switching back to Android because of it. I swore off Android in 2013, but might be worth trying again. All these mini-updates Apple keep releasing, and none include a fix for this. Get it together!!!

Mine has just started to do the exact same thing today! I get the wheel for a few seconds, then the passlock screen.

I can’t believe this is an issue that has been going on for over 12 months!

Did anyone find a way to fix it?

iPhone 7 Plus user here

iOS version is now 11.1.2

Same issue happening with me since yesterday. It stops any running app and shows black screen with spinning white wheel. It takes you to the home screen to be unlocked again.

The phone has become unusable.

I started having this problem last night after plugging my phone into the charger. The battery was low (35%) so once it was charging, the phone decided to update some apps. From that moment forward, my phone would do the black screen with spinning wheel about every 3 minutes - almost too fast for me to even get a successful backup. The phone would also get quite hot. So I suspected that it was related to an app update.

Restore in iTunes worked for me - the phone stopped misbehaving. BUT soon after restoring from backup, as soon as all the apps had finished downloading & installing again, the problem returned (restoring from backup does not restore the apps - just app placeholders and app settings - the apps then need to download/install again from the App Store). So from that point I knew it was an app causing the issue. This makes sense, because the problem started after a bunch of apps updated the night before. So I deleted about 20 apps (non-Apple ones like Shazam, Spotify, various airline/airpoints apps, about half of what I could see - then I stopped to see if the problem had gone. And yes, the problem had gone away. So I did a Restore from backup again, with the intention of reproducing the problem (and then uninstalling apps one by one, waiting a few minutes between each one to see if the problem had gone away). But this time I had a better idea and when the apps were reinstalling, I quickly tapped on any apps that were downloading/installing, to pause them, and the problem has not returned. This means one of two things:

A) the problem is either Heatmiser (app to control my central heating), Shazam, Headspace, or Trello (the only ones I managed to catch before they installed)

B) In the 18 hours or so between the time when I put my phone on charge at night, and when the problem went away, an app developer released a bug-fix for the problem they created 18 hours earlier, and after restoring my phone, perhaps it downloaded the latest version which fixed the issue. E.g. whatever app was at fault, got updated during the time I was messing around with my restores (but it must've happened within a 15 minute window, so quite a big coincidence).

My point is, this can be an iOS issue, but it can also be an app issue. My symptom was regular black screen with spinning wheel followed by asking me for passcode or Touch ID (this means it's not a full reboot - the iPhone will not accept touch ID after a reboot) - the phone would get hot - and during each reset cycle the phone would make that chime it makes when you plug in the charger. Any text or email you were writing, would be lost during the reset. Full power offs and stuff did not help at all of course.

So, if you have this issue, before you erase/restore everything, you might want to first try:

1) do a full backup in iTunes - make sure you tick "Encrypted backups" as this will mean that iTunes stores all your passwords and some other extra stuff in the backup file. It means when you restore, you'll have less work to do, to get your phone back to its original state. BTW, I noticed that even if the phone did its reset thing in the middle of an iTunes backup, iTunes seemed to be able to complete the backup after the reset finished. But out of paranoia I kept trying until I managed to time it right and get a full backup between resets.

2) delete about half of your 3rd party apps from the phone (or if you like, delete them one at a time and just wait between resets). If you can't be bothered staring at your phone to see if it's still resetting, just open up Messages and type in an SMS to someone but don't hit send. Then when you come back to your phone you can tell if it's reset, because it will be at the home screen and the unsent SMS text will be lost. Once you find the bad app, maybe contact the app developer and tell them what's happening, or try reinstalling it to see if you can reliably make the problem reappear and disappear by installing then reinstalling the app. If you get to zero 3rd party apps and the problem hasn't gone away, THEN...

3) so you couldn't fix the problem by finding a flawed app... so maybe it is an iOS issue. In that case, Erase/Restore via iTunes (assuming you backed up in step 1!!) then Restore from Backup. If the problem is still present then in my mind it has to be an actual iOS bug (which some of the first original posters in this thread experienced with iOS10), or an app bug that hasn't been fixed yet.

I will edit/post again when I later have some more time to unpause the install of those remaining 3 apps that are paused, but right now I don't have time to risk it as I need my phone for work for the next few hours.

I wonder if you got hit by the same app bug that I did? Mine would have been caused by an app update that had a serious bug in it, because the phone was working totally fine until my phone updated a handful of apps (I know WhatsApp was one of them, but so was AirBnB and a few others). I plugged it into the charger, which, when the battery is low, allows the iPhone to install pending updates (assuming you're on a wifi network) - I remember seeing it instantly start updating apps as I put it on the nightstand.. then as I was falling asleep it was making the "charger just plugged in" chime noise randomly every few minutes. I thought it was maybe just my charging cable going bad (i.e. bad connection) but didn't realise till the morning that it was the darn phone rebooting. So I am 99.9999999% sure this particular (30th Nov - 2nd Dec) occurrence is tied to an app update. The first posters in this thread had the same symptoms but for them it was an iOS10 bug (I'm on 11.1.2).

Uninstalling Headspace worked for me too! It must be something in the app that has an issue with the date 1st December 2017 and after. Something to do with the little pop up reminders perhaps? Either way, the bug had me totally confused and now that I've uninstalled, the issue has gone away! Thanks Angela!