Why does my watch continuously say “Waiting for data”?

I see this quite often too. It seems a bit random According to this Reddit thread, Garmin is aware of this issue for more than 3 years: www.reddit.com/.../

Looks to be the weather widget, and there's a problem with multiple devices if you have an iPhone.  There will be an update to GCM/iOS that fixes it at some point.

The same thing happens on Android :(

Check the watch after running the weather app on your smartphone

You need location services to be on for the phone, and you may want to try getting a GPS lock on the watch.

Also, GCM needs to be running on your phone.

Wanted to resurrect this post because I am still getting the same issue. Location services is set to “always on” and the Garmin connect app is running. I’ve restarted my watch but continue to get the “waiting for data” message on the weather widget.  Any ideas on how to fix this?

Same issue, I simply powered off my watch, left it for 5 mins and powered up. Then connected to Garmin Connect and weather app came back up straight away.

Restart the watch. Worked for me

I had the same issue but also noticed the heart rate and stress had stopped recording to the connect app. 

Not the best troubleshooting as I didn't wait to see which fixed it but I remembered I'd changed the units on my profile online via the web app. I didn't sync the device after that. Once I remembered I'd done that I logged back online, changed the units back, and synchronised. I also restarted the watch.

Everything worked afterwards.