Have you ever completely frozen when something unexpected happens? Hi, I’m Tomo. I use my iPad every day, and minor issues happen from time to time. I always thought I was pretty good at handling things like restarts or quick fixes — but this time, my iPad froze in a way that wouldn’t let me restart it at all.

A Glitch Happened While Using YouTube

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One day, as usual, I was searching for videos on YouTube when suddenly I saw flashy glitches — pink stripes, dots, and patterns I’d never seen before.

I was surprised, thinking, “What kind of bug is this?” When I tried tapping around, I couldn’t return to the home screen, and even turning the power on and off just made the same screen appear and disappear. So I tried restarting it…

Restart Didn’t Work

Normally, to restart an iPad, you press and hold the power button and the volume up button.
But this time, even that didn’t bring up the power-off screen. Holding down the power button alone didn’t force it to shut down either.

So I asked a friend — and surprisingly, they had experienced exactly the same issue. They sent me this article:

iPad Pro が反応しなくなった時に再起動する方法

According to the article:

1. Press and quickly release the volume up button
2. Press and quickly release the volume down button
3. Press and hold the power button

Following these steps, the iPad should restart. I tried it — and the iPad that had completely stopped responding restarted instantly.

The Cause Is Still Unknown

So far, I’ve only experienced this while using YouTube, but my friend said it also happened while using apps like Mercari.

My iPad is still on iOS 18 because I intentionally avoided upgrading to the latest version, so it’s unlikely to be a bug introduced by a recent OS update.
So this is just my personal guess, but I suspect it might be an issue with the app-side SDK — possibly something related to SDKs built for iOS 26.

I’ve been using this iPad since 2018, so I honestly thought it had finally died — but thankfully it recovered 😊

If you ever run into a similar glitch, give this a try 👍