Update breaks WiFi authentication on Samsung Galaxy S6, leading to heavy battery drainage

Be it Google or Samsung, WiFi connectivity issues are plaguing flagship devices from both tech giants. While ‘dropping WiFi’ problem is already widespread among Pixel users, somewhat similar WiFi related issues are now being reported by Samsung Galaxy S6 owners as well.

What’s coming to light is that a recent firmware update has triggered WiFi authentication glitch on the Galaxy S6 flagship phones, wherein the connection keeps dropping, throwing an error that says, authentication error occurred.

If losing WiFi connectivity wasn’t enough, users also say these WiFi drops are also draining device’s battery, presumably due to the device constantly trying to connect to available WiFi networks.

Some users even had to pay extra bill to their carrier due to the problem, as they didn’t observe it earlier. Aside from the official Samsung Community and Reddit, even Twitter is flooded with user complaints about WiFi authentication failures. Following are some of the recent tweets highlighting the same problem:

https://twitter.com/Robert_McD/status/947472545397334017
https://twitter.com/OliverFindlay/status/946722562976993280
https://twitter.com/Spomsoree/status/946352615830507520
https://twitter.com/brimoss33/status/945586711177973760
https://twitter.com/Jenna33981345/status/944284560870858754
https://twitter.com/Champy1973/status/943238718466543616
https://twitter.com/NewHotHead/status/940693955355783169
https://twitter.com/arodri1203/status/936814276429340672

It’s worth mentioning that while the WiFi problem is being reported mostly by Galaxy S6 users, there are stray reports about the same on other Samsung devices too (like the Galaxy S7 and the Note 5).

As the number of reports about WiFi authentication failure piled up, a moderator on Samsung’s official forums effectively confirmed the glitch recently, saying they’ve passed the info to the company.

While I don’t know what the developers are working on in detail, I do know that I’ve passed along the information

See the complete statement here:

While it’s a relief that the matter has at least been officially acknowledged, there’s no information as to how long will it take to fix WiFi authentication failures. We hope the company does that sooner than later. Meanwhile, following are some user-suggested workarounds that you can try hands on (worked for some, but not all):

Samsung Community 1 2 | Reddit

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