Sleep Wake Failure: Reboots only after upgrading to High Sierra

I found that having "power nap" set on seemed to be the heart of my sleep-reboot issue. I didn't have the problem under HS until I turned power nap on and the problem ended when I turned power nap back off.

I had never had any issues like this until I upgraded to High Sierra and then it was persistent.

Somewhere, I saw a reference to the possibility that it could be related to VPN software, which struck a chord because I had just recently installed Cisco's AnyConnect Secure Mobility Client. So I uninstalled that app, and the issue went away. Then I reinstalled the app, expecting the issue to return, but it has not returned and it's been 2 or 3 weeks.

I suspect that won't help the majority of users, but I thought I'd share it in case it helps a few.

Tried the "sudo pmset standby 0" fix mentioned in this thread.

Worked Flawlessly! Its been a couple weeks with no more crashes!

Hello Tom,

Could you, please, check if your Power Nap (PN) option in the Energy Saver settings panel has been enabled. In a parallel thread at:

Sleep Wake Failure with High Sierra 10.13.2

there has been a discussion which suggests that with PN enabled the computer, may not go to sleep at all, which may appear as not spontaneous reboots and Sleep Wake Failures (SWF).

I would be more than happy if it turns out that the SWF problem has been resolved for good in your computer, but it might help others to know if there could be any link with the PN setting.

Thank you.

So at the end the last 10.13.2 update solved the issue - MacBook 12 is running since 3 days without restarting...

Not clear whether Apple Cares or not but it does appear Apple is not moving very fast to fix the problem.

Since I have an iMac I have decided to not use sleep, set up this up in energy saver by saying sleep never.

The screen and the hard disk will still power down but the computer will not sleep so it always comes up immediately.

I am told by a friend who does this for other reasons that the power consumption is very low in this mode and I believe it.

You can downgrade to normal Sierra here:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208202

Hopefully that will fix it for now

Hi all -- I have had this problem too for months. Don't want to raise false hope, but I upgraded to 10.13.3 yesterday and it hasn't happened since. Based on my past experience, I would have expected to see it by now. Anyway -- may be worth giving the update a try. May the force be with us!

This seems to work with my early 2014 mac book air with a 3rd party owc 1tb aura pro x ssd drive.

My guess, as has been espoused in this forum, is that if the machine sleeps, when it wakes back up, it takes too long for the 3rd party drive to initialize, and a watchdog goes ahead and reboots the machine - twice!

Since Apple does not care about the problem and I need a system that works, I decided to downgrade to Sierra. Thanks Apple! 😠

I have this problem on MacBook Pro Retina 13 Mid 2014. I found, that when I simply close the lid for a couple of hours system restarts (in a strange way, with 2 boot sounds). But when I log out and then close the lid for the night, then system wakes up OK.

Until you get it resolved, I'd log out on extended times away as in overnight.

Does it also do the rebooting if you force it to sleep?

Update to 10.13.3 solved the problem on my late 2013 iMac.

Here is my tale.

I have MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2016, Four Thunderbolt 3 Ports) purchased in early February 2017.

After multiple failures to wake which was at the end not helped by NVRAM or SMC resets I took the computer to my local Apple Store. They were unable to get the computer to function and they accepted it for repair under warranty. When I got it back they had replaced the main board, the battery and the display; basically everything. The computer came back with MacOS 10.12.6 installed. Before I reinstalled ANY of my software the computer began to show Sleep Wake Failure. I now have turned off sleep and that is how I will continue to operate so that I can salvage some of my investment in this machine.

My first Mac was a 128K Macintosh. This MacBook Pro will be my last Apple computer. As demonstrated by this support thread and my own experience, Apple has multiple software and hardware problems with its current generation Macs and it is clear that they are both unwilling and more importantly UNABLE to fix these problems.

Adding on so that maybe Apple notices how many people are having this issue and does something about it...

Mid 2015 MacBook Pro on 10.11.6.

I don't think it's an OS issue, necessarily, but a hardware one as I have a Mid 2011 MacBook Pro that has been on everything from 10.7 up to 10.12 and it does NOT have this issue. It seems to be common to 2015 models as I have googled this issue and that one seems to show up the most.

This happens about once a week fairly reliably on the same day. Why the same day? Because that's the only day I remove it from being plugged in and take it elsewhere with me. It goes from a desk where it is attached to 2 external monitors and uses a USB Ethernet adapter for internet and then to another desk where it uses the wireless (the WiFi is turned OFF when it's at the first desk and is only turned ON after I log in at the second) and does not connect to any external monitors. In transport from one desk to the other, it is asleep. It does not reboot right away. Rather, it seems to reboot randomly anywhere from a couple hours after being moved to 12 or so. Usually this happens without my having interacted with it at all during this time. Just now, after not having touched the computer since I moved it at around 4:30PM today, it rebooted itself while sitting here with the lid closed and (supposedly) asleep.

This is a continued annoyance. I would also like to note that the rest of the week, as the computer sits in the same spot and is put to sleep rather than shut down every day, it doesn't reboot.

The reasons given for the reboots each time is sleep/wake failure. The usual fixes of resetting things doesn't do it. As it's happening on different versions of macOS, I don't think it's necessarily an OS issue, especially given that my 2011 MacBook Pro is not having this problem (it has other issues which I think I can attribute to the OS that amount to the Mac version of blue screening (something it never did pre-10.10), but that's neither here nor there since it's not a "sleep/wake failure" error...)