The Samsung Galaxy S6 recently got an update that was supposed to improve the overall experience, but it also brought some issues. According to user reports, the Galaxy S6 keeps losing its Wi-Fi connection after being updated to new the firmware carrying build number G920FXXu5EQI8, which in turn also affects battery life. It seems the update triggered a Wi-Fi authentication glitch and the phone won’t stay connected to Wi-Fi for more than a few minutes. Users report that this happens on all Wi-Fi networks, and that re-entering the Wi-Fi passwords does not solve the issue. No solution is available at this point for this matter, but Samsung is currently looking into the matter and is expected to issue a fix soon enough.
The issue is not only frustrating, but also costly in some cases. Users don’t always notice at once that their Wi-Fi connection has dropped, and staying online with no Wi-Fi can incur extra data costs. The phone connects to Wi-Fi, but drops shortly after and yields a message saying “authentication error occurred.” Moreover, users are also reporting that the Wi-Fi connectivity issues are also taking a heavy toll on the smartphone’s battery. As the device keeps trying to reconnect to available Wi-Fi networks, its battery drains significantly faster than it should. Some users have even tried restoring the smartphone to factory settings and resetting the cache partitions, but to no avail – the issues persisted.
Affected Galaxy S6 users took to the official Samsung Community forums, as well as other sites such as Twitter and Reddit, to report on the matter. Based on the number of user reports, it seems that the issue is quite widespread. The good news is that a Samsung Community moderator acknowledged the issue and said that developers are working to fix it, albeit no additional information is available at this point. If Samsung is aware of the glitch and is working on it, however, it shouldn’t take too long before it figures out what went wrong so it can fix it. In the meantime, some users have found a couple of workarounds such as setting the router to broadcast only on 2.4GHz, or changing the DNS setting to STATIC. These tricks may not work for everyone, but they’re the only solutions available until Samsung rolls out an official fix.