Touch Bar Not Working After MacOS Update? Troubleshooting Black Touch Bar on MacBook Pro

A fair number of MacBook Pro users with Touch Bar equipped Macs have discovered the Touch Bar stops working or goes black after installing a MacOS update. Given that the Touch Bar serves as Function keys, F1, F2, F3 etc keys, as well as toggles for adjusting brightness, system audio, and accessing many MacOS and app features, and even serves an Escape key for some Touch Bar Macs, having the Touch Bar vanish and fail is not particularly great. Even if you disabled the Touch Bar to have it simply display system toggles, having it disappear completely is still frustrating, because there’s no other way to access those toggles on the keyboard.

If your Touch Bar is not working or the Touch Bar vanished on your MacBook Pro, particularly after installing a system software update to MacOS, read along to troubleshoot the issue.

1: Kill / relaunch TouchBarServer process

Some users report that killing and relaunching the TouchBarServer process can cause the Touch Bar to reappear and start working again.

You can do this in Activity Monitor by searching for “TouchBar” and then selecting the “TouchBarServer” process and killing it, or by going to Terminal and using “sudo killall TouchBarServer”.

Some users report this alone will instantly revive the Touch Bar. If this doesn’t work for you, next up is to try regular old rebooting.

2: Restart

Some MacBook Pro users have revived their Touch Bar by simply restarting the Mac. This is easy to do, just go to the  Apple menu and select Restart.

3: Restart into Safe Mode

Booting a Mac into Safe Mode has fixed the Touch Bar disappearing issue for some MacBook Pro users.

For an Apple Silicon Mac, booting into Safe Mode is accomplished by shutting down the Mac, then pressing and holding the power button until the Startup Options screen appears, then selecting the boot disk and holding down the Shift key while selecting “Continue in Safe Mode”.

For an Intel Mac with Touch Bar, restart and hold down the Shift key.

4: Restart into Recovery, then Shutdown, then Boot again

An unusual sequence has revived a dead Touch Bar for some MacBook Pro users, and here’s how to do that:

You’ll boot into Recovery Mode by shutting down the Mac, then pressing and holding the Power button until the Startup Options screen appears. Next, shutdown the MacBook Pro completely. Wait a minute or so, and then power the Mac back on again.

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One interesting aspect of the Touch Bar suddenly not working is that all Touch Bar settings on the Mac within System Settings also disappear, even if TouchBarServer is still running in MacOS.

While some of these troubleshooting tips and reboots are kind of annoying, you might find that the Safe Mode restart also reduces your enormous System Data in the process, so you’re potentially resolving two issues at once. Hooray?

I recently experienced this exact issue with the Touch Bar failing and vanishing after installing macOS Sequoia 15.5 update on a Touch Bar equipped Apple Silicon Mac (how much testing does Apple do with new system updates on old Macs with the abandoned Touch Bar technology?). If you go looking for this issue you’ll find you’re certainly not alone, with hundreds of reports on Apple support forums, again and again and again and again, along with multiple different posts on reddit and other places where people gather to gripe about technical issues they experience.

Unfortunately for some Mac Touch Bar users, sometimes the Touch Bar is just completely dead and can’t be revived, even after reinstalling MacOS system entirely. In that case, going to an Apple Store and having them run diagnostics and doing a repair service may be necessary, but with an out-of-warranty Touch Bar Mac, you might find the repair cost to be prohibitive ($700, nearly the price of a brand new MacBook Air, by some reports!), in which case either buying a new Mac (they ditched the Touch Bar tech a while ago anyway) or buying an external keyboard and turning the Touch Bar MacBook Pro into a desktop workstation, may be potential alternatives to pouring hundreds of dollars into an old Mac that is using Touch Bar tech that Apple abandoned anyway.

Have you experienced the Touch Bar failing, disappearing, going black, or vanishing and no longer working after installing a MacOS update to your MacBook Pro? What did you do to resolve the problem? Share your experiences in the comments.