Apple Watch Bug Causing Restarts When Asking Siri About the Weather

Saturday November 4, 2017 5:53 pm PDT by Juli Clover

There's a strange bug with the Apple Watch today that's causing resprings whenever Siri is questioned about the weather. Asking Siri something like "What's the temperature?" or "What's the weather?" or "Is it raining?" causes the Apple Watch to crash.

The issue has been documented in several threads on the MacRumors forums and on reddit, and we've also been able to replicate it on our own devices.

Complaints about the problem appear to have started this morning, and the bug is confirmed to be affecting both LTE and GPS Apple Watch Series 3 models as well as older Apple Watch models running watchOS 4.1. Not all Apple Watch owners in all countries are affected, but it appears to be impacting users in the United States, Canada, and Europe.

It's not yet clear what's causing the issue, but the weather app itself is working fine, and restarting and resetting the watch don't appear to fix the problem. From MacRumors forum member SRLMJ23:

It is not rebooting, it is spring-boarding. The App (Siri or Weather?) is crashing but not the entire watchOS. Just time how long it takes for a reboot vs. spring-boarding. Spring-boarding takes way less time than an entire reboot.

However, this bug appeared today because yesterday everything was working fine when I asked Siri "What is the forecast for today" or "What is the temperature right now."

I am sure Apple will fix this pretty quick!

I have an Apple Watch Series 3 + LTE/GPS. Very odd bug, cannot wait to see what Apple has to say about this.

Curiously, asking Siri about the weather tomorrow or next week doesn't cause a problem -- it's only questions about the current weather conditions that are resulting in errors. It's possible that this is an issue related to the upcoming time change, as one reddit user has discovered. Daylight Saving Time is set to end on Sunday, November 5 in many regions in the United States and Canada.

Okay, I think I've figured it out. It's a bug related to the end of Daylight Saving Time. If I ask for the weather in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, it works. If I ask for the weather in Winnipeg, Manitoba, it crashes. Saskatchewan doesn't observe DST. I think if a time change is set to occur within 24 hours in the city you're asking about, it will crash.

Apple will likely have this fixed shortly (or it'll clear up after Sunday), but for now, it's best to avoid using the watch to ask questions about the weather in order to prevent sudden resprings.

(Thanks, Shawn!)

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Top Rated Comments

(View all)

farewelwilliams

30 months ago

Weather Forecast: Better put on your…
...
…reBoots

Rating: 24 Votes

mistasopz

30 months ago

That's pretty terrible. Apple's own apps running on their hardware and ecosystem can't even give you the weather forecast without crashing.

Rating: 18 Votes

burgman

30 months ago

Read the article and the posts. Sitting an airport lounge and bored. Siri what’s the weather today. Yup restarted let’s start a drinking game about this.
[doublepost=1509843009][/doublepost]

It did it to me today while I was driving. "Just use your phone" isn't an option while driving.

At least it should be OK tomorrow.

You could look out the window ;)

Rating: 9 Votes

oldmacs

30 months ago

This is why I don't trust Apple to build a car.

Rating: 8 Votes

MH01

30 months ago

Must be in the U.K. . That is Siri giving the answer on how bad the weather is .

Rating: 7 Votes

katbel

30 months ago

Just tried it and my watch is restarting right now..It's snowing today , maybe it's a little too early for the watch too :eek:
Canada, West Coast

Rating: 4 Votes

JPLC

30 months ago

Is it still ok to ask Siri to play November Rain?

Rating: 4 Votes

Vjosullivan

30 months ago

I love the overreactions on here regarding this minor (and yes it is minor!) bug. OS' are extremely complex, bugs slip through, especially a bug that seems to only occur with one specific siri request on only one day out of the year. During Apple's beta testing period, how exactly would they test for this?

An application bug that causes an operating system crash isn't minor. What this demonstrates is that it is possible to use Siri to crash the system. That's actually a serious security flaw that may be exploitable because it demonstrates that there is a problem with application sandboxing. Furthermore, given the close relationship between Apple's various operating systems, it may be a flaw that's exploitable elsewhere.

So, while you may think people are overreacting and that having your watch crash if you say the wrong thing at the wrong time is fine, hopefully Apple are taking it rather more seriously because you can be sure that there are people "out there" that are already looking into what happened and how it could potentially be exploited.

Rating: 4 Votes