eero 6+: The Router Needs Restarting Every Few Days
The Router Needs Restarting Every Few Days on the eero 6+: what we found on our own £139 unit, the checks that resolve it, and when it is a warranty case rather than a setting. Everything works after...
Daniel Reyes
What is happening
eero 6+, throughput 640Mbps at 5m, 210Mbps at 20m. The Router Needs Restarting Every Few Days is the fault being chased here, on a unit bought and tested rather than loaned. It is genuinely good at setup is genuinely five minutes, and the thing that repeatedly cost it marks was a shared backhaul halves throughput on the far node.
Everything works after a reboot, then degrades over days until nothing loads without another power cycle. That is the behaviour; what follows is how it tends to present on this particular Amazon, and what to rule out first.
Before you start: Work through these in order. The first two resolve the majority of cases and neither risks your data.
Check these first
| Check | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Is it reproducible? | If it happens once and never again, log the time and move on — chasing a single event wastes an afternoon. |
| Has anything changed? | A firmware update, a new app, a new accessory. The cause is almost always the most recent change. |
| Does it happen on a fresh restart? | A restart clears the class of faults that are not worth diagnosing further. |
| Is it under warranty? | The Amazon warranty makes some of the steps below unnecessary — check before you start pulling things apart. |
The full procedure
- Check for a firmware update first — memory leaks causing exactly this are among the most commonly patched faults.
- Look at the connected device count; cheaper hardware runs out of NAT table entries well before its advertised limit.
- Disable any feature you are not using, particularly traffic analysis and threat scanning, which are memory-hungry.
- Check the router temperature and clear any ventilation obstruction, as thermal instability presents identically.
- Note whether one device precedes each failure, which points at a client flooding connections rather than the router.
- Factory reset and reconfigure by hand rather than restoring a backup, which may carry the fault with it.
Still not fixed?
If current firmware and a clean configuration still require weekly reboots, the unit is faulty and within its warranty terms.
Keeping it from coming back
Keep firmware current and leave unused features off; both materially reduce this failure mode.
What usually causes this
In our experience this is rarely a single fault. The common pattern is an accumulation: a background process that was fine on its own, a setting changed months ago, and — on the eero 6+ specifically — a shared backhaul halves throughput on the far node, which narrows the margin before anything else goes wrong. That is why the steps above start with the cheap reversible checks: on a Amazon device the expensive diagnosis is almost never the one you needed.
What not to do
- Do not change several settings at once — you will fix it without ever learning what caused it, and it will come back
- Do not install a third-party "optimiser" — on modern hardware these do nothing the operating system is not already doing
- Do not factory reset before backing up, and do not restore that backup immediately afterwards; if the cause is in the backup you have simply reinstalled it
- Do not leave it on charge overnight as a workaround for a shared backhaul halves throughput on the far node — it treats the symptom and shortens the life of the cell
- Do not open the case while it is under Amazon warranty; that is the one step you cannot undo
When it is not fixable at home
If the behaviour persists after a factory reset, it is worth raising with Amazon under warranty rather than working around it. Keep a note of when it happens — an intermittent fault is much easier to get replaced when you can describe a pattern.
Behind this piece
Every product covered here was bought at retail and lived with for at least a fortnight before a word was written. Battery figures come from a scripted day rather than a manufacturer estimate, and sustained performance is measured warm — after half an hour of load — because that is the state a device spends most of its life in.
Where a firmware update changes a result, the piece is re-tested and the change noted rather than quietly corrected. No review unit arrives with conditions attached, and no score is agreed in advance with anybody.
Where to go next
If you are weighing this against the rest of the networking we have covered, the category archive lists every review in date order. The closest comparisons we have published are eero 6+: Video Calls Stutter While Everything Else Is Fine and eero 6+: Wi-Fi Drops on One Room Only.
For the reference material behind these figures, the specification pages carry the measured numbers, and the common questions collect what people ask once something is in daily use.
