Charge 3 showing 001 error

[troenaas]

My Fitbit Charge 3 is not responding. Just blinking Fitbit logo on the screen. Cant reboot or do anything - it vibrates when I try to reboot.

Moderator edit: subject for clarity

[AndreaFitbit]

Thanks for getting back to us and for confirming that you have followed advised troubleshooting steps @Tazma.

The best way to get help for this problem is to chat with us online or give us a call. Click here to get connected.

See you around. 

[Brunnogens]

Even after following the instructions the Fitbit is not coming out of 001 screen. Will the support team reach out to me? 

[Rich_Laue]

@Brunnogens this is a community support board, please tap on your photo found in the top right, then tap contact support. 

[AndreaFitbit]

Welcome to the Fitbit Community, @Brunnogens. Thank you for letting us know that you tried the instructions in order to remove the 001 of your Charge 3 screen. 

Please confirm that you have tried restarting your Charge 3 and the long restart.

Thank you for your advise @Rich_Laue.

See you around. 

[FaPa]

Hi all,

Just wanted to share my experience here with the same issue (error 001 on a Charge 3). This is now fully working in front of me, but worth mentioning that it took me a while.

I tried all the solutions suggested on the forum, as well as the ones I got from technical support. None of them really worked.

I think the problem probably stems from a firmware/software problem that occurs when the battery goes into a deep discharge (in my case, I left it unused for a couple of weeks). When you plug it back in, the charger does not actually charge it. Proof of this is that even after 24 hours of continuous charging, when I managed to restart it, the battery was still at 0%.

How did I unlock it? Basically, I tried the following many, many times.

When I plug it into the charger, the screen does not turn on. The side button works (you can feel the vibration when you touch it) and you can try both soft and hard resets (holding the button down for 8 or 15 seconds). Usually neither will solve the problem. The device will restart, but the screen will remain blank and (most importantly) the battery will not charge significantly, leaving the problem unresolved.
After a few minutes (in some cases it can take up to an hour), error 001 appears.
When this happens, I think you still have very little energy in the battery.

At this point, I changed the procedure a bit.

1) I quickly tried to reset the device (long press on the side button while still connected to the charger) until the display went blank

2) then quickly (ideally before the device reboots) disconnect the charger and reconnect it to the USB.
Worth to mention that this didn't work immediately, as there is probably a sweet spot for it to properly reboot.

A few times I got the device to show the smile and eventually reboot properly. However, even after quite some time on the charger, the battery was still at 0% and as soon as I unplugged it, it was dead again. That means that for some reason the charging function was not unlocked.

I had to do this procedure several times (I think it took me about a month) and eventually it turned back on and started charging.

As a residual issue, after that, I had some problems with Bluetooth for the first week, but then it connected to my phone and now it's working fine.

This pretty much confirms my feeling that the extremely low voltage reached by the battery can in some cases trigger the microcontroller and lead to some glitches/bugs that make the device unusable and, most importantly, unchargeable.

I know this has taken quite a long time, but I hope this will help some users as well as the development team to perhaps release a firmware that protects the device (and maybe future devices) from deep discharge and saves some residual energy for the microcontroller to start.

All the best

[AndreaFitbit]

Welcome to the Fitbit Community, @FaPa. 

Thanks for sharing the steps that worked for you in order to get your Charge 3 working again. 

These steps could help to other users experiencing the same issue.