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I've recently been having these kernel panics relating to watchdogd for the last few weeks, tried reinstalling, a magnitude of settings...and got nothing....until today....

I use a 2018 MacBook pro with sonoma and a Philips external monitor, I was getting these crashes with or without the monitor and at varying times, randomly I just thought id change the resolution of the MacBook screen from 1680 x 1050 and drop it down by one to 1440 x 900.

Since doing this I've had zero crashes in the last 3 hours (when normally it would crash every 2 mins), so I suggest trying it and let us know how u get on.

Interesting
What solved it for me is: "I went back to Monterey"

My god do I prefer the older macOS versions
Absolutely rocket fast and snappy .. and I love having System Preferences back
 
Time traveler from 2024 back on this issue~~
I came across this panic-watchdog-windowserver issue 6~8 times a single day, together with all the infamous errors including "Green screen of death"\Black out\Panic\Freeze etc.
These problems happened across MacOS 13 and 12.

Downgraded to Catalina 10.15.1-19B88, everything start to function like a charm.
I'm now running all day under quite a lot cpu+gpu load with completely no errors.

So my conclusion is that the fault is all on Apple.
 
My wife has 2024 MacBook Air m3 and I have 2022 MacBook Pro M1 Pro. We started seeing this issue a few months ago after about 1 month of connecting our laptops at separate times to a HP E24m g4 usb-c monitor.

My wife had to stop connecting to the monitor because it would crash while doing video appointments.

Apple has not been helpful at all. Any suggestions? Thanks
 
Last edited:
What the…?!

Back to this thread again, now with a Mac mini with M4 Pro and macOS 15.3.2 and guess what? Kernel Panics with this in the log:

userspace watchdog timeout: no successful checkins from WindowServer

I have seen this Kernel Panic two times and only when gaming in full screen. Not seen it in other scenarios when using the computer for non-gaming stuff. Hmm…

Edit:

Also found this in the KP log:

Kernel Extensions in backtrace:\n com.apple.driver.AppleARMWatchdogTimer(1.0)
 
It's 2026 and this is STILL a problem.
Been having this issue for YEARS. Device is a 2020 13-in MacBook Air, Big Sur 11.7.10. Husband purchased it new in 2020, didn't use it much and gave it to me the following year. KPs started within a year of me using it.

I do not use the Photos app, and I have disabled iCloud on all of my devices. The photo library of the photos that did come over from my iPod when I synced it is on an external drive that I rarely connect to the computer (I moved it for disk space).

I do not use external monitors or even semi-permanent external HDs. 99% of the time the only things connected to it are the charging cable (the one that originally came with the computer) and a pair of headphones. It is connected to WiFi, but no other network.

I don't have a lot of the apps that have been giving others here problems... I really mostly use this for internet browsing and household spreadsheets/basic word processing. I don't have Dropbox or any Google apps installed. I haven't installed anything at all since... maybe last fall?

It has crashed during active use maybe 2-3 times, 99% of crashes are overnight while it's idle.

When it crashes during active use, I get a fair bit of warning... this computer always runs warm to begin with, but when it's about to crash the fans go nuts, like seriously it sounds like a jet engine trying to take off. It also slows down a LOT. If I'm quick enough, I can save/close things and shut it down myself, but usually I get as far as save/close before it hangs and I can't shut down via the Apple menu. Usually it just sits there roaring for takeoff for minutes on end before I hold down the power button and put it out of its misery. When I reboot it, it gives me the 'your Mac was restarted because of a problem' message with the error report.

Early on, I tried disabling any and all sleep/power saving settings, which helped a little -- went from crashing literally every single night to crashing once a week. It also seems that the more apps I leave open, the more likely it is to crash. Lately I'm experimenting with actually minimising the apps I do leave open (literally only Firefox and Music) before I walk away from the computer. So far that might also be helping? (I do NOT have the 'sync over WiFi' setting turned on on either my phone or my iPod.)

In the last week it's gotten exponentially worse, from once a week (sometimes longer) to 3-4 times a week. Yesterday it crashed during active use but I caught it early and was actually able to shut it down myself.
 
It's 2026 and this is STILL a problem.
Been having this issue for YEARS. Device is a 2020 13-in MacBook Air, Big Sur 11.7.10. Husband purchased it new in 2020, didn't use it much and gave it to me the following year. KPs started within a year of me using it.

I do not use the Photos app, and I have disabled iCloud on all of my devices. The photo library of the photos that did come over from my iPod when I synced it is on an external drive that I rarely connect to the computer (I moved it for disk space).

I do not use external monitors or even semi-permanent external HDs. 99% of the time the only things connected to it are the charging cable (the one that originally came with the computer) and a pair of headphones. It is connected to WiFi, but no other network.

I don't have a lot of the apps that have been giving others here problems... I really mostly use this for internet browsing and household spreadsheets/basic word processing. I don't have Dropbox or any Google apps installed. I haven't installed anything at all since... maybe last fall?

It has crashed during active use maybe 2-3 times, 99% of crashes are overnight while it's idle.

When it crashes during active use, I get a fair bit of warning... this computer always runs warm to begin with, but when it's about to crash the fans go nuts, like seriously it sounds like a jet engine trying to take off. It also slows down a LOT. If I'm quick enough, I can save/close things and shut it down myself, but usually I get as far as save/close before it hangs and I can't shut down via the Apple menu. Usually it just sits there roaring for takeoff for minutes on end before I hold down the power button and put it out of its misery. When I reboot it, it gives me the 'your Mac was restarted because of a problem' message with the error report.

Early on, I tried disabling any and all sleep/power saving settings, which helped a little -- went from crashing literally every single night to crashing once a week. It also seems that the more apps I leave open, the more likely it is to crash. Lately I'm experimenting with actually minimising the apps I do leave open (literally only Firefox and Music) before I walk away from the computer. So far that might also be helping? (I do NOT have the 'sync over WiFi' setting turned on on either my phone or my iPod.)

In the last week it's gotten exponentially worse, from once a week (sometimes longer) to 3-4 times a week. Yesterday it crashed during active use but I caught it early and was actually able to shut it down myself.
Have you been able to figure out what the issue is? I've had this problem since upgrading to Sonoma which was a while back. It was intermittent and only happened when I ran Microsoft Teams so I always figured that was the issue. I needed Teams for work so I had to tolerate. Fast forward, I stopped using Teams and this issue is still happening. I can't pinpoint where it's coming from because it could be a multitude of things I have running or opened. I did an Apple Diagnostics and it says hardware is fine so I'm guessing it's a software thing.
 
Have you been able to figure out what the issue is? I've had this problem since upgrading to Sonoma which was a while back. It was intermittent and only happened when I ran Microsoft Teams so I always figured that was the issue. I needed Teams for work so I had to tolerate. Fast forward, I stopped using Teams and this issue is still happening. I can't pinpoint where it's coming from because it could be a multitude of things I have running or opened. I did an Apple Diagnostics and it says hardware is fine so I'm guessing it's a software thing.

In privacy and settings do you have anything under 'Developer Tools'?
 
In privacy and settings do you have anything under 'Developer Tools'?
I just checked and I don't have anything under there. Also, I went through this entire 48 page thread and tried researching other places online. Seems like everyone has a different reason why this happens so I run through all of them and see what I can try.
 
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