Why Does Your Phone Restart On Its Own Without Warning?

One minute your phone is working just fine and the next minute it’s completely dead – then the manufacturer’s logo pops up and it starts all over again. No warning, no update notification, nothing. Just a random restart right in the middle of whatever you were doing.

Random restarts are a problem that affects millions of phone users. In some cases, it’s a one-time glitch that never happens again. In other cases, the phone gets trapped in a restart loop that turns it into an expensive paperweight.

What makes it worse is that you have no idea if it’s a minor software problem you can fix yourself or if the internal parts are actually failing after years of use.

Let’s talk about how you can fix this!

Software Issues That Restart Your Phone

Your phone actually treats software problems like a bouncer would handle troublemakers at a nightclub. An app can start to misbehave and when that happens the system kicks everyone out and then starts everything back up fresh. It’s a protective measure that stops just one bad app from completely ruining your entire phone experience.

Corrupted system files are almost always responsible when your phone decides to restart out of nowhere. Files can become damaged all the time – an app might crash at just the wrong time or a software update doesn’t finish the way it was supposed to.

Big operating system updates can also throw your phone into endless restart cycles. iOS 17.0.3 was a disaster in this department – thousands of iPhones just kept restarting over and over and Apple had to scramble to push out an emergency patch within days. Android 14 ran into the exact same mess when it first launched.

Beta versions and day-one updates are riskier than the updates that you get later on. Developers haven’t had the time to test for all the weird scenarios that could go wrong. Your phone has its own specific combination of apps and settings and this particular combination might trigger a bug nobody has found yet. Most experienced users wait a week or 2 before they update and I recommend you do the same.

Once you install a big update, your phone has to reorganize every one of its internal resources. Part of the process means that it removes the old cache files and completely rebuilds the system databases from scratch. Every bit of this reorganization causes the multiple restarts during the first day or 2 after the update.

App conflicts are another big source of the restart problems that can throw off your phone. When 2 different apps need to use the same system resource at the same time, you have a problem. The 2 apps are stuck because neither one can proceed without that resource and they can’t share it either. The operating system sees this deadlock and decides the only way out is to restart the whole phone and wipe everything out.

How Your Phone Handles Extreme Heat

Your phone might also restart when it runs too hot. Every modern smartphone has temperature sensors built right into it and these sensors check how hot everything inside the phone is. Once the internal temperature climbs above what the manufacturer has determined to be safe (usually somewhere between 95 and 105 degrees Fahrenheit), your phone will automatically shut itself down. This protects the delicate internal parts from heat damage.

Phones can get pretty warm during normal use and you’ve probably felt yours heat up from time to time. Maybe you were playing a graphics-heavy mobile game for 1 or 2 hours straight. Or maybe you were recording a very long 4K video at your kid’s soccer game. These activities make your processor work extremely hard and all that work produces tons of heat. Another common culprit is leaving your phone sitting on your car dashboard with GPS navigation running during a hot summer day. That combination of direct sunlight and processor strain can really cook your device. Even something as basic as wireless charging as you’re watching videos can sometimes push the temperature past what’s safe.

Apple wants you to use your iPhone between 32 and 95 degrees Fahrenheit. Samsung’s temperature range for its Galaxy phones is the same. The manufacturers set these limits because extreme temperatures can permanently damage your processor and your battery – and once that happens, there’s no way to fix it. Your phone is a lot like a car engine in this respect. We all know not to drive when the temperature gauge hits the red zone and phones are the exact same way.

But before your phone actually shuts down from excessive heat, you’ll usually see a few warning signs that something’s wrong. The screen brightness might suddenly drop on its own – even though you never touched the brightness settings. Apps that normally work just fine might start to lag, stutter or freeze up completely. And the phone itself will feel uncomfortably warm to the touch and the heat is usually most obvious around the camera module or wherever the main processor sits. These symptoms are your phone’s way of telling you it needs to cool down before the damage becomes permanent.

When Your Phone Runs Out of Memory

Memory problems are actually responsible for a lot of random phone restarts that drive everyone crazy and the whole situation gets more confusing because phones use two types of memory and each creates their own set of problems. Storage is the permanent space – that’s where your photos, videos and apps you downloaded actually get saved permanently.

RAM problems are one of the most common reasons that phones restart themselves without warning. Maybe you have 40 browser tabs open at the same time, or Instagram has been active in the background for the past 6 hours straight. Each app needs its own amount of RAM just to run and eventually your phone just doesn’t have any memory left to allocate. When the operating system realizes it’s completely out of resources, it forces a full restart to wipe everything out and start fresh again.

Storage problems are a whole different category of frustration and they can really affect your phone’s performance. Once your storage hits around 90% full, your phone will probably start to behave oddly. The operating system has to have room to move files around and build temporary caches and run its regular maintenance processes. When there isn’t enough free space available, basic tasks might just refuse to work.

The warning signs of an impending memory-related restart are usually pretty obvious if you’re aware of what to watch for. Apps will suddenly crash as you try to open them. The keyboard might freeze or lag a few seconds behind your typing. The camera app might refuse to save any new photos because the phone literally can’t find anywhere to store them.

Social media apps are by far the biggest memory hogs on your phone. Every time you scroll through your feed, these apps are quietly downloading photos, videos and all sorts of content in the background. They cache everything to make the app feel faster the next time you open it. Pretty soon, a single app has hoarded a few gigabytes of cached data that you’ll probably never need or see again. Your phone’s operating system is working overtime to manage these different apps fighting for the same resources and eventually it just gives up and forces a restart to wipe everything out.

When Your Phone Battery Goes Bad

Your phone’s battery might actually be the reason why it won’t stop restarting on you. Most lithium-ion batteries start to have problems delivering steady power after about 2 or 3 years of everyday use. The magic number is somewhere between 500 and 800 charge cycles and each cycle is one full charge from nearly dead all the way back to 100%.

After a battery has been through a few years of everyday use, the voltage that it gives isn’t nearly as steady as it used to be when your phone first came out of the box. At that point your phone doesn’t have much choice – it needs to shut down to protect its internal parts from possible damage. The frustrating part is that your battery indicator might still show 30% or 50% charge right before your phone suddenly powers off.

Apple actually got into some hot water a few years back for slowing down older iPhones without telling anyone. The controversial part was the secrecy. But their reasoning was pretty sound – they wanted to stop these exact sudden shutdowns that happen when batteries start to fail. iPhones have a Battery Health feature built right into the settings menu and it tells you what percentage of original capacity your battery still has. Android users have to download third-party apps like AccuBattery to get the same information but it’s worth checking it.

Some charging habits will speed up how fast your battery loses its capacity. That convenient habit of plugging in your phone every night and letting it charge until the morning isn’t great for long-term battery health. The same goes for those dirt-cheap chargers from the gas station checkout counter. Temperature extremes are especially brutal on batteries too – the scorching heat of a car dashboard in summer and the bitter cold of winter outdoor use will take their toll.

Battery problems usually announce themselves in a few obvious ways and most of them are hard to miss. The big one that everyone notices first is when the battery life drains noticeably faster than it did 12 months ago. A phone with any physical swelling or bulging needs to be dealt with right away. Another red flag is when your device shuts off even though the battery meter says you’ve still got 20% or 30% left – that’s a sure sign that you’ll need a new battery soon.

How to Find the Real Problem

Your phone stores a hidden diary of every crash and unexpected restart and the best part is that these logs are just sitting right there waiting for you to read them. iPhone owners have an easier time – the crash reports are just a few taps away in Settings, then Privacy then Analytics & Improvements. Android phones make you work a little harder for the same information since the Developer Options has to be turned on first. But after that the process is identical.

Each crash report comes with a timestamp that tells you the exact time your phone decided to restart itself. What you want is to scan through these reports and watch for patterns, especially with app names that show up over and over. When the same app shows up in multiple crash reports that’s usually a pretty strong sign that you’ve identified the source of your problem. Safe Mode is super helpful when you’re trying to track down restart problems. The way it works is actually pretty clever – your phone will only run its core system software and completely blocks all the third-party apps from launching. This gives you a clean testing environment and if the restarts suddenly stop while you’re in Safe Mode then you can be confident that one of your downloaded apps is causing the problem.

iPhone and Android come equipped with their own diagnostic tools that show you what’s going wrong. Samsung takes this a step further with secret codes that unlock hardware testing features that most users never even know are there. On Samsung devices, you can dial #0# and it opens up a whole menu of hidden diagnostic options. The timing of these restarts actually tells you quite a bit about what the root cause could be. Some phones only start acting up the second that a specific app opens and others seem to have the problems right around the time the battery drops below 30%. The temperature matters too – phones have built-in safety features that force them to restart if they get too hot from heavy use or from baking in the sun all afternoon.

Hardware problems are actually a pretty common culprit for random restarts and they’re easier to miss. A battery that’s started to swell up will press against the phone’s internal parts and create all kinds of chaos – the back of your phone might even start to bulge out a bit. Most phones have these liquid damage indicators hidden in the SIM card tray too. They’re these small stickers that turn a different color when water has made its way inside. And sometimes the problem is ridiculously basic – maybe the battery connection has worked itself loose or the power button took one too many hits after you dropped your phone.

Any of these can make your phone restart right when you need it most.

Easy Fixes for Your Phone Problems

A phone stuck in a restart loop can make your day go from productive to frustrating in about 2 seconds flat. Usually though you can fix this yourself pretty fast without having to visit a repair shop. The fastest fixes are also the easiest so we might as well try those first.

The first step to try is a forced restart and basically you’re going to make your phone shut down and start back up completely fresh. For this you need to hold down your power button along with the volume down button at the same time for roughly 10 seconds. iPhone users will want to press the side button and either of the volume buttons instead. Android phones are sometimes different from model to model but the power and volume down combination works on most of them. A forced restart like this will usually fix whatever temporary glitch was making your phone restart over and over again. Then the next step is to clean out your phone’s cache which is basically temporary files that can sometimes get corrupted. Head into your settings menu and look for the storage section. Once you’re in there you should see an option for cached data that you can tap to wipe it out.

As you’re already in the storage settings take a quick look at how much free space your phone has available. When yours is packed full just go ahead and delete some old photos or those apps you downloaded months ago and never actually use. A lot of the time the whole restart problem comes from just one problematic app. Try to remember when the restarts first began. Downloading a new app right around that same time could mean that’s probably your troublemaker. Delete it and watch to see if your phone stops restarting. Another way to find problem apps is to check your battery usage in settings. Any app that’s destroying your battery life at an unusual rate could be the one causing all these restarts.

Software updates matter too. These updates include bug fixes that specifically address restart problems along with other issues.If you haven’t already, turnon automatic updates so your phone will always have the latest fixes installed.

One more thing that’s worth checking is your battery itself if your phone is over 2 years old. Batteries wear out over time and when they can’t deliver steady power anymore your phone starts acting up with random restarts. Most repair shops will replace a battery for somewhere between $50 and $100 and it’s a pretty fair fix if that turns out to be the problem.

Trade Your Old Phone for Cash Today

After years in the business working with customers who have phone problems, I’ve seen that these devices can take quite a beating and still continue working. The troubleshooting steps and tips we went through earlier should fix around 90% of the restart problems and usually you’ll see results within 1 or 2 days of working through them. Once you get a feel for how your phone actually operates and what it needs to run well, you’ll start to notice the early warning signs of problems that are coming and you can head off most problems before they have a chance to ruin your entire day.

A little bit of maintenance now and then only takes a few minutes every week or so and yet it can be the difference between a phone that barely makes it through 2 years and one that’s still running strong after 4 or 5 years of regular use.

When your phone does finally reach the point where it’s time to retire it (even with all the maintenance in the world, every device has its limits), we at ecoATM give you an easy and quick way to convert that old device into cash right then and there. We have over 6,000 kiosks across the country that can run diagnostics on your phone and you walk away with same-day cash or online payment. It’s probably the quickest way to upgrade to a new phone and also put some money back in your pocket – and your old device stays out of the landfill. There’s a location near you to check what your phone is worth right now, even if it’s been restarting more than it’s been working the way it should!