Steam Deck randomly restarting after 3.6 update. Anyone else?

[Hopsenburg]

I've been having serious issues with my Steam Deck after updating to the experimental 3.6 update and I haven't been able to fix it even after rolling backwards. I updated to 3.6 and I noticed my Steam Deck is randomly shutting off in Gaming and Desktop mode. Sometimes it shuts off in minutes and other times it shuts off after a couple minutes in a game or in the hub.

I've tried rolling backwards to the Beta firmware and then backwards to the Stable firmware and noticed it hasn't fixed. It's still randomly booting off. The other weird issue I noticed is that it wouldn't show it was charging until I rolled backwards. Now it does show charging, the battery is full, but I'm getting randomly disconnects. Every time it turns off, it goes back to the firmware verifying itself.

Is there any fix for this besides doing a factory reset and losing all my downloaded games? Has this been reported? Anyone else having issues? Starting to worry my Steam Deck has become bricked now.

[TheDizzle78]

Are you just now updating to 3.6??
The way it sounds is something may be really jacked up with going back and forth between beta and stable so much. You may actually benefit from a wipe and reimage. You only lose what’s on your SSD. Your SD card games will be unchanged.

[Dario]

Have similar issues, reimaged and it's still happening, worried that it might be a hardware issue at this point.

[Hopsenburg]

Originally posted by Dario:

Have similar issues, reimaged and it's still happening, worried that it might be a hardware issue at this point.

I managed to fix it but it wasn't easy because it kept restarting so much. I don't know if you need to do all of these steps. Some of them might be overkill. But, I re-imaged my Deck as well, lost a lot of saves since not all of them went to the Cloud, and it didn't fix the issue.

After the , I then turned on Developer Mode and turned off the power saving WIFI mode because I believe this might've been the culprit and the Deck is turning off because they made changes to the WIFI drivers in the 3.6 update in the Experimental update channel. The update causes the Deck to power itself down when the WIFI connection is unstable.

After that, I went and set the Deck to the Beta channel and let it update. So far, I've been playing about 10+ hours and it hasn't restarted yet. I'm staying away from the Experimental channel from now on. It's Experimental for a reason and I learned the hard way.

I would recommend looking up the 3.6 Experimental update and look at the folks having to turn off the WIFI Power Savings mode because a lot of other folks were having the same issue with their Deck's powering down too. I don't know if it's because if folks like myself and others have a Deck with maybe a specific Wifi chipset that broke in the new update, but that's my guess.