Over the past several days, but really more the past several weeks, there’s been an uptick of COROS watches dying (bricking) after being updated to the latest COROS watch firmware that was released in mid-May. For most users, the death isn’t immediate, but rather seems to occur some amount of time later (days or weeks), often resulting in the watch failing to turn on. For whatever reason, this has come to a head in the last 7 days, primarily on Reddit. All of which has resulted in COROS’s CEO posting numerous times on the platform to try and mitigate the growing fallout.
I figured I’d run through what’s going on, separating a bit of reality from internet chatter (as best as possible), and then most critically what COROS has been (or not been) doing about it. I see this post mostly as a historical placeholder type post, similar to the one I wrote about when Garmin hosed all their watches a year ago. However, for some users running into the issue, it might shine light on something they didn’t realize was a bigger problem than just their own.
With that, let’s get into it.
The Bricking Issue:
According to those with impacted watches, watches will fail to start (called ‘Bricking’/‘Bricked’) at an undetermined time period after the May update. In some cases, that’s immediately following the update, but in most cases it appears to be some days later, and sometimes seems vaguely tied to a massive drop in battery life. There seems to be a vague trend to the Digital Crown not working just before death, but not always. The watch tends to also perform erratically, and then basically just dies.
Then it comes to the model, it is varied, but COROS says it’s primarily impacting models that are 2-4 years old, and the COROS Pace 3 seems to be most impacted. But they also noted that’s somewhat of a numbers coincidence, because it’s also the most popular watch they’ve sold – thus will logically have more people report issues than a less popular model.
Basically, once your watch has bricked in this particular way, there’s no undo button. No method to roll-back a firmware update, or even get the watch to a state to do such an operation if it were offered. The watch is useless.
While I’ll get into the full COROS response in just a second, I figure this particular snippet is worthwhile including, from COROS:
“From what our software and hardware engineers can tell, there is no single issue that is stemming from a firmware update that has lead to an increase in device failures.”
I’d translate this line as roughly one of two ways:
A) There are a few things in this update that are breaking watches
B) We have no idea why this update is breaking watches this way
But let’s set the cause aside for a second and determine whether or not this is a widespread issue. Or, how widespread if so. COROS’s official account noted in a Reddit thread the following:
“In the past 72 hours, our customer service team has responded to over 100 customer support tickets reporting issues about their watch becoming defective after an update and offered replacements for any device failures on this topic.”
That’s in addition to a previous statement made by their CEO a day or two prior stating:
“More than 99.9% of firmware updates are completed successfully. We have millions of devices in the field, and while we’ve seen more discussion of hardware failures recently, the actual number of reported hardware defect cases remains consistent with historical trends.”
This little tidbit sounds good at first glance (and by most industry standards, it is), but it ultimately gets to what people often refer to as the YouTube Experiment problem: 1% of a million is still a really big number. YouTube will often run variations/tests of new features on a ‘small’ portion of the population. It might be 0.1% or 2%, or such. Which at first sounds small, until you remember that 1% of ~3 billion users is…checks notes…30 million people.
So, in the case of “millions” of users as COROS notes, that’d mean that (using 2 million), that 0.1% of 2 million is 2,000 people. Thus, in reality, the 100 customer support tickets is actually *smaller* than the number of potentially broken folks (some might have broken earlier, some the update failed for a minor/unrelated reason, etc…).
But flipped around, 100 people posting individual threads to Reddit about their watches dying quickly becomes a tsunami. However, even with that noted, looking through all the threads, we’re talking low dozens of dead device threads in total on the COROS forum over the past 4 weeks (some of them quite seemingly related, some of them very much not).
So let’s talk about what COROS’s response has been.
The COROS Response:
COROS did not get off to a good start here, to say the least. Part of the ‘challenge’ is that COROS relies very heavily on AI chatbots as the front-line of customer support interaction. And it seems those AI chatbots are anything but helpful in these situations, with countless customers reporting toilet-swirling interactions that led nowhere, with no resolution or help from a real human (or an AI bot helping, for that matter).
Adding insult to injury, for the few that did eventually manage to battle their way through to a real human, COROS offered between a 10-20% discount on a new watch (in some cases, repair, if the country supported a repair program). So in effect, a person:
A) Had their perfectly functional watch die after the update
B) Spent a dumb amount of time battling with an AI bot
C) Eventually was told to buy a COROS watch for a near-negligible discount (especially notable when you consider Amazon’s Prime Day sales next week will offer huge discounts on lots of watches)
As you can imagine, the internet was (rightfully) not happy about this.
To COROS’s (minor) credit here, when people (over the last 4 weeks) did post to Reddit with tales of their lack of AI-chatbot assistance, COROS tended to request the ticket number, and seemed to solve it behind the scenes for folks (albeit, most times that was just giving them a 10%-20% discount).
Finally, though, earlier this week as the COROS Reddit forum became overwhelmed with discussions about this (of which I’d note, the vast majority were not even people having issues with their own watch, just speculative threads), COROS’s CEO finally stepped in with a post, saying:
Hi everyone,
My name is Lewis, co-founder and CEO of COROS Wearables.
I recently created this Reddit account because I’ve been spending more time reading discussions here, and I wanted to be more directly involved in conversations with the community.
One thing I’ve noticed over the past few weeks is that we’ve seen a higher-than-normal number of support tickets involving issues reported after recent software updates. If you’ve been affected, I completely understand the frustration. Software updates are supposed to improve your experience, not create new concerns. Please submit support tickets so our team can look into your cases.
Our team has been actively investigating every case. So far, we’re seeing that these reports do not indicate a widespread software quality issue. If there were a systemic software defect, we would expect to see large numbers of users on the same model experiencing the same problem. Instead, what we’re seeing are isolated cases. While every case matters, the number of affected users remains very small compared to our global user base of several million users.
We’re reviewing each case individually to understand the root cause and determine the right solution. In many instances, software updates appear to expose or accelerate underlying hardware issues that may already exist, rather than creating entirely new problems. Regardless of the cause, we take every report seriously and are committed to finding the right resolution for affected users.
More importantly, I wanted this account to be a place for open conversation. Whether you have questions about products, software, training features, company decisions, future plans, or things we could be doing better, feel free to ask below. I’ll do my best to answer as many questions as I can.
I can’t promise I’ll have every answer, but I can promise I’ll read all the posts.”
Umm, this post did not go over terribly well, with over 197 comments, many of which weren’t super positive. Most people basically wanted to see some real numbers here, rather than a lot of hand-waving.
COROS did eventually respond again, which we’ll get to in a second. But I’ll point out two semi-conflicting things:
A) COROS seems to really struggle with how to deal with large-scale watch failures. This isn’t the first time. There have been two different battery-related issues the company has had to deal with, and both times they’ve been slow to respond. The same goes for the entire security fiasco exactly one year ago next week.
B) Inversely, there’s virtually no other large-scale sports tech firm where the CEO will get on Reddit and respond to customers individually, at all times of the day. Wahoo, probably, back in the day under founder Chip Hawkins, but definitely not anymore. So, credit where credit is due, even if the company as a whole has been slow to respond.
Anyway, fast forward four more days of beatings (…‘The beatings will continue until morale improves’), and COROS has posted a new thread again, with a message that basically says “if your watch is broken, we’ll replace it”:
Hey all!
We want to take some time to share updates and regarding the increase in defective watches reported in this sub recently and give a single thread where anyone can get immediate help.
First and foremost, we want to reiterate our apology for any inconvenience this may have caused in everyday life, training, racing, or simply trust in the brand. As a brand and community, we always want to place emphasis on our users and your critical feedback, hence giving this subreddit the time it deserves, and occasionally that comes with issues popping up in the process.
For anyone who has written into support via the COROS app:
In the past 72 hours, our customer service team has responded to over 100 customer support tickets reporting issues about their watch becoming defective after an update and offered replacements for any device failures on this topic.
For any of you who have recently written into COROS Support about your watch becoming unusable after a recent update, but were not contacted, please feel free to comment your ticket numbers here if you found the support offered by our team was unsatisfactory.
In the future, if you are experiencing any critical hardware issue that prevents your watch from being functional, please reach out to COROS support with the keywords “critical hardware failure” and our system will escalate it for you.
Again, we apologize for any lack of communication or confusion that arose on this topic. We are confident that any users experiencing issues with their device after a firmware update will receive the proper level of support and an immediate solution. As always, feel free to send us a Direct Message or comment with any questions or ticket numbers that can be managed by the appropriate team and thank you again!
I reconfirmed with COROS via e-mail thread that yes, if a device dies after this update, they will replace it. Here’s the exact quote:
“Also correct – for anyone that reaches out and has had a device failure after a recent firmware update we are replacing those devices.” – Darian Allberry, Head of Product Marketing and Support – June 17th, 2026
At this point, it’s hard to argue with the end result of the situation, even if the path to get here was trying (at best). I’d like to see COROS rely less on the AI chatbot, or, have more oversight into those conversations behind the scenes. Some companies have leveraged AI chatbots super well (for example my Oura experience last fall), but most struggle to make it a good experience for customers. It seems the bar for success is “Did it save the company money?”, rather than “Did it save the consumer time?”. Companies might be surprised you can pull off both at once…sometimes.
COROS’s response in the last day has finally shifted towards one of acceptance and offering clear-cut solutions to impacted users. But one thing that has stood out throughout this is the seemingly off-ratio number of comments, relative to supposed actual number of impacted users. One of the challenges with the internet, of course, is bad actors. And in the case of product related bits, companies that engage in bots and bot-like paid troll behavior. These companies will essentially spun up (and buy in bulk) hundreds to thousands of accounts, and sprinkle comments across the internet with negative points about their competitors.
As one whose job it is to sift through these comments every day (primarily on YouTube and here on the site), I’ve regrettably become pretty good at figuring out real person/comment, from ‘fake’ comment. The days of simply having an existing profile account that spans a few years doesn’t mean much (these are just purchased en mass, trivially). And inversely, simply complaining about a product doesn’t mean it’s a fake comment. Instead, you tend to see specific patterns in exactly what the issue is.
For example, you often see identical or nearly identical comments (a couple words changed), but from multiple accounts/profiles. But that’s the easiest form to pick out (easy for me, but hard for other users to see). You tend to see heavy usage of LLM’s (AI) in these comments, and wording that often doesn’t make a lot of sense. There’s a core difference between someone simply translating into English (from another language), and using an LLM to generate a wordy comment.
In looking at a silly number of Reddit posts the last few days, it’s clear *a portion* of that is coming from fake accounts. I don’t think it’s the majority however, but it’s clearly a portion (I would guess 10-15%). I’d almost certainly guess the source of these comments is another watch company from China, as that’d fit the bill for what I see across my channels. I’ve not seen any evidence that Garmin/Suunto/Polar/Apple/etc are paying for this type of activity. One has to remember that in China, from a business perspective, this type of behavior is entirely normal and accepted as part of “just doing business”. A conversation point I’ve had numerous times with companies from China, which they will readily admit to. They simply see it as just another part of their marketing (even if most other companies see it as smear campaigns).
And remember that post-stirring is a *key* part of this strategy. Meaning, fake accounts often will insert unrelated negative issues, simply to increase the total comment count, even if it doesn’t have anything to do with the issue at hand.
Finally, I will note that so-called fanboyism comments tend to be distinctly different from fake account comments, specifically in that 90% of the time when you reply to a fanboyism comment, the fanboy will engage in debate (often stupid debate, but debate nonetheless). Whereas approximately 0% of the time when you engage with fake accounts, will they reply. The scale is just not worth it for automated and managed accounts to reply to discussions.
I don’t have a solution here for this, there really is none (short of requiring ID or credit cards to post on the internet, which I don’t think anyone really wants). Otherwise, just note that it exists here in smartwatches, as it does in any other portion of the internet.
Wrap-Up:
With COROS now saying they’ll swap out watches that die due to the update, I don’t see any reason not to update your watch. I’ve gone around and updated every COROS each I have in my ‘COROS Watch’ bin, and none have died yet. Though admittedly, it’d probably take a number of days, and on top of that, it’d require me to be part of the sub-0.1% crowd that gets sideswiped. I think most of us would take the 99.9% odds that the device will be fine, versus not.
Plus, like it or not, watches do indeed die for all sorts of unrelated reasons all the time. That’s just a fact of life for any product, obviously, the symptoms here for at least a set portion of the population did seem pretty similar (Digital Crown dying, erratic behavior, high battery burn, then failure to turn on).
With that, thanks for reading, I’m off to go ride my bike and swim. Have a good weekend!
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