I woke up this morning to find my iPhone 15 stuck in a recovery mode after updating to iOS 26. It displayed a message saying, "The iPhone encountered an issue while restarting. The recovery process will look for any problems and attempt to resolve them if found." This caught me off guard because I hadn't even attempted to restart my phone last night.
I followed the prompts—entered my passcode, connected to Wi-Fi—but it just kept saying, "Recovery is Underway" and then, "No Known Issues Found" followed by the option to restart. This loop has been going on endlessly. I even connected my phone to my MacBook Air with Tahoe 26.0, but it didn't show up in Finder, so I couldn't restore it that way either.
After trying the recovery process multiple times, it finally restarted. When I connected it to my MacBook to back it up, I noticed I only had 4 GB free out of 128 GB. Could this low space have caused the problem? Any advice would be appreciated!
2 Answers
It sounds like low storage could definitely be contributing to the issue. When an iPhone is critically low on space, it can run into problems like this. If you're still having trouble, try performing a hard reset to turn off your iPhone, then manually put it in recovery mode. After that, you can attempt to update the iPhone. If that doesn't work, a restore might be needed, but make sure you have a backup to restore from! If recovery mode doesn't help, try DFU mode instead.
I had a similar experience with my iPad Pro. It got stuck in recovery mode after updating to iPadOS 26. The recovery mode kicked in right after the update was completed without any issues. I had plenty of space, around 300 GB, so that didn't seem to be my problem. After entering my passcode, I kept getting a message saying it couldn't recover and it would just restart again. I also don't have a backup to fall back on, which makes things trickier!
It seems like it's asking for the Wi-Fi password. I had a similar cycle happen overnight, and it finally resolved after a while. If you can manage to get back into the iPad, make sure to back it up right away!