Forerunner 945 LTE dies during activities and resets after latest update

I bought a Forerunner 945 LTE from garmin.com and received it on Jan 11. I took it out for a walk that day and it worked seamlessly.

At some point between Jan 11 evening and Jan 12 mid day, the watch installed at least one software update. I had seen the message like “sending update to watch” in the app, but I did not start the update, so I can only assume it started by itself.

Since then, my activities crash, often at the 1:04-1:05 mark, with the watch restarting.

See this series of activities. I was swimming in open water between two poles roughly 100m apart.

I read somewhere that it might be a wiring issue, so I started a walk session on the couch. Same result. In particular, same 1:04 duration before the crash.

Between the timeline of the update and the fact that the crash happens at the same duration, I’d say this is a software, not hardware issue. Fingers crossed, I guess. Otherwise, the watch is unusable as a training device, and I'd have to send it back.

I’m based in Australia and experienced the issue on LTE. I saw another post of someone saying they were in Australia when the watch started playing up.

For what is worth, I hereby give Garmin support staff approval to access my data in order to diagnose this issue.

  • I’m skeptical that this will fix it, since gps is off during pool swims and I couldn’t get it to run for more than a minute at a time at the pool yesterday. 

  • What I have found so far after talking to Garmin is that after a full reset of the watch and deleting the app and Bluetooth  the watch in activities etc functions fine. But as soon as you connect thdd ex phobe , Bluetooth , and lte the phone crashes, on an activity it only gets to about 1.04 - 1.18 and then drops out and restarts, and then after this and deleting the phone app and Bluetooth again the watch continues to restart  until you go and do a full hard reboot delete of the watch setup again 

  • So you reset the watch and then delete Garmin Connect from your phone and turn off Bluetooth? Yikes. 

    I can’t tell if Garmin Support is taking this seriously or not. I’ve been sending them files and videos all day, but this seems like a show stopper bug to me. 

  • Yeah, I can’t believe how much of a pain this has been , brand new watch with lte for a reason, and it has done nothing but disappoint me from first use.

    After talking to Garmin today, it turns out ( apparently ) that the watch has a fault and I can either send it back to Garmin so the engineers can find the problem and fix it,. I still cant see how with numerous guys having this same sort of problem though that it’s not a software thing from the update

  • Hello, just curious if this fixed it for you? I ended up getting a replacement as well and just successfully did a 5 mile run

  • hi there, 

    just to let you know received a brand new replacement watch today, loaded my info onto it , spotify music, and headphones, everything i originally would use and the watch for when runningand it worked perfectly form start to fiinish. hpefully thsi is the case for the rest of the watches usage and i will be super excited

  • Thank you for sharing . Glad it worked out for you!

    Just to confirm, did you have LTE on for your run? I found that turning off LTE is the safest way for me to not get the crash.

    I’m hesitant to send back my watch because I love using it, but I guess if it really works out in the end, it’s better to bite the bullet.

    Thanks!

  • Hi Gio, sorry to get everyone’s hopes up, I talked to soon, just did a map update on Garmin express and now the watch is doing exactly what my original one did , just spoke to Garmin, and now have to do the full master reset thing, see what it does , and then get info to engineers. I can’t believe one minute it was fine, it does a map update and then continually crashes the watch a minute or so in on run activity when started

  • And sorry Gio, yes I did have lte turned on during run activity

  • Oh man, I'm sorry this happened to you. 

    Thank you for keeping the thread up to date.

    At this point, this can only be a software issue. Fingers crossed they'll ship a fix soon.