How to Fix a Frozen Amazon Fire Stick

An Amazon Fire Stick isn’t a particularly powerful streaming device. As such, it’s prone to freezing from time-to-tome.

If your Fire Stick is frozen right now, or if your device keeps freezing, keep reading. We’re going to look at some solutions.

Why Does Your Fire Stick Keep Freezing?

The newest Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K only has 8GB of storage. As the memory fills, the device will become more sluggish and unstable. You will quickly hit the storage limit if you keep installing apps without deleting the ones you no longer use.

You can see which apps take up the most room on your Fire Stick by going to Settings > Applications > Manage Installed Applications and scrolling through the list.

Fire Stick devices are similarly underpowered when it comes to RAM and CPU power. The 4K model only has 1.5GB of RAM and a Quad-Core 1.7GHz processor. It means that if you sideload an app with power-hungry processes, the entire system is liable to seize up.

It is this same lack of power that can result in some HD IPTV streams buffering on a Fire Stick whilst being fine on a PC or Nvidia Shield.

Unfortunately, there is no easy way to see which processes are currently running on a Fire Stick, so it’s not necessarily easy to identify the culprit. If the problem has just started happening, try deleting any apps that you recently installed.

(Note: If you stick to using the best Fire Stick apps, the CPU usage issue should be less common)

Finally, you need to consider the possibility of damage. A firm blow to the device’s casing or accidental exposure to water could have created issues with your Fire Stick’s internal components.

How to Fix a Frozen Fire Stick

Let’s look at some solutions to fix a Fire Stick that keeps freezing.

1. Use Your Remote

If you have your Fire Stick remote handy, you can force your Fire Stick to restart by using a secret button combo. Simply hold down the Home + Play/Pause for at least 10 seconds, and you should see the device shutdown and reboot.

2. Disconnect the Power

In an ideal world, you’d use your remote to restart a frozen Fire Stick; it’s less likely to corrupt the data than ripping out the power cord. However, in the worst case, disconnecting the power, waiting for 30 seconds, then reconnecting everything will have the same affect. Just don’t make a habit of it!

3. Factory Reset

Although it’s the most nuclear option, performing a factory reset will get rid of any gremlins that are causing your Fire Stick to keep freezing.

If you perform a factory reset, you will lose all the data on your device, including sideloaded apps, locally saved content, and saved login credentials.

To reset a Fire Stick, power up the device and head to Settings > My Fire TV > Reset to Factory Defaults and agree to the on-screen warning.