Faulty Watch Series 8 and Watch Ultra? Apple is looking into it

Apple has acknowledged that its new Watch Series 8 and Watch Ultra are suffering from an issue with their microphones.

As reported by numerous owners of the company’s latest wearables, the issue stops various apps from working properly, including Siri, Dictation, Noise and when making phone calls.

Apple Watch owners report of seeing a “Measurement Suspended” error message. As one user posting on Apple’s customer forums points out: “It’s as if the mic is being used by another app, we’ve closed all apps on the watches, rebooted them, updated them to the latest Watch OS…but no success.”

According to a memo seen by MacRumors, Apple has now acknowledged the issue and says affected users may be unable to properly use Siri, record voice memos and make phone calls. Apple says that restarting the Watch may temporarily fix the problems, which suggests the bug is not hardware related.

This corroborates with another Apple customer, who said: “Everything works fine if the watch is rebooted, but after an indeterminate amount of time, the microphone stops picking up any audio (and the Noise app, specifically, shows ‘measurement suspended’).”

The same user later said how deleting the Noise app – which uses the watch’s microphone to calculate how loud its environment is, then issues a warning if hearing damage may be possible – seems to have fixed the problem. They later added that deleting the Noise app “appears to delay the issue temporarily, it doesn’t resolve it entirely.”

Another said how they were given a replacement watch by Apple, and that after five days they had not experienced any issues with the microphone.

Watch Series 8 and Watch Ultra owners are asked to ensure they keep their software update, suggesting Apple will roll out a patch to fix the bug shortly.