Earlier this week, I was just about to sit down to dinner when I glanced at my wrist and noticed that my Apple Watch was going absolutely haywire. The screen was furiously flittering among apps as if controlled by some invisible person who was pressing buttons at lightning speed. Within seconds, my Series 9 had somehow changed my daily fitness goals, sent a random Slack message to all my coworkers (“Hello!”), and, to my horror, was now calling 911. Which I was helpless to stop.
“911, what’s your emergency?” the operator asked.
“I’m sorry,” I sheepishly muttered into my wrist, “My Apple Watch accidentally called you.”
“Okay,” she replied, sounding unsurprised. She asked for my name.
After she hung up, my watch informed me that it was now calling my emergency contacts.
In desperation, I took the device off my wrist, and, as usual when it isn’t being worn, it asks for a passcode. But the phantom was still going, typing random numbers into the keypad, as if on a mission to guess my passcode using every combination possible.
I set the watch down and looked online to see if this was happening to anyone else—and if there were any fixes. To my surprise, there were quite a few posts on Apple’s discussion forums from others experiencing the same issues with the Series 9 and Ultra 2 models over the past few months. “My watch went crazy today, flicking between different screens, typing its own texts, I couldn’t stop it or turn it off, had to just wait for battery to go flat to stop,” wrote one Ultra 2 user.
“My Apple Watch 9 (bought mid-December 2023) just started going crazy,” wrote another user. “It was switching apps, trying to enter passcode, and then finally, after two minutes of trying to stop it, sounded the siren and called 911.” The user noted that the emergency operator, like mine, seemed unfazed that the call was made in error by an Apple Watch and wondered if it was a common occurrence. (Apparently, it is.)
I also spotted a report from February claiming that Apple was “aware of” and “investigating” the issue of so-called ghost touches on some Series 9 and Ultra 2 devices. I hoped that my watch was merely haunted and hadn’t been hacked.
Rebooting it, as some users suggested, temporarily cleared up the issue for me. I still felt a little disturbed about what had happened—and was suddenly very conscious of how little I really know about this device that I wear on my body almost 24 hours a day.
A spokesperson for Apple did not provide any additional information about the cause of the issue, but told Fast Company that it was addressed in the latest watchOS 10.4 update, which was released in March and “resolves an issue that causes some users to experience false touches on the display.”
It’s still unclear to me why my watch didn’t automatically update to the new watchOS, since I have automatic updates turned on for both my iPhone and Apple Watch. But I’ve since updated my watch, and hopefully any malevolent Apple Watch spirits have been exorcized.
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