Touch Bar not working after macOS Tahoe 26.0.1 update

Yeah, after reading josefromunion's post this morning, I tried resetting again, and lo and behold, after rebooting there was the touch bar restored to live, along with a new 'keyboard' status icon in the menu bar. I can't imagine how and why that has happened with no further update, but I'm pleased it has, whilst wondering what on earth happened over these few days Tahoe-wise that caused the problem in the first place!

Hi everyone,

I have a MacBook Pro 13-inch, M1, 2020 (16GB RAM) running macOS Tahoe 26.0.1.

After updating to this version, my Touch Bar completely stopped working — Nothing happens, and the Touch Bar does not reappear.

I also checked System Settings → Keyboard, but there’s no Touch Bar configuration option anymore — it simply disappeared from the settings UI.

Nothing has helped so far.

Has anyone else experienced this after the Tahoe 26.0.1 update? Any workaround or fix you can share would be greatly appreciated.

I am having the same issue. It works completely fine but i cant see anything. Like I can increase or decrease volume or brightness but I cant see anything on display.

I tried rebooting, restarting, opening in safe mode, running diagnostics and even in diagnostics it shows everything works fine.

I have the same problem, and I couldn't find the fix for it yet.

I'm having the exact same issue! Hopefully they fix this quickly! Its quite annoying not being able to control basic stuff without the Touch Bar! My next macbook wont be the touchbar version!

mine doesn't work too, touch bar not active and nothing about touch bar in setting (MBP M2)

Personally I tried everything, and I can't even access the touch bar settings. They show up in the settings search, but I can't click on them.

This worked for me.

This worked for me too.

On my 2020 M1 MacBook Pro with the same issue, I didn't even have to restart; as soon as I "force kill"'d the process, it restarted itself and the Touch Bar came alive!

3 employees Mac’s had this issue in the past week

Yes this worked for me as well on M2 after Tahoe update.

me too i lost touchbar after update mac os tahoe 26.1 my machine is mac pro m1 2020

I also have a 2020 M1 MBP running 26.0.1 and my touch bar went totally blank today.

Here's what finally worked for me:

• Shut down mac completely
• Hold down power button until it starts, keep holding until "loading startup options" appears
• Select Disk Utility and run First Aid on the Macintosh HD (in my case it came up clean)
• Restart, log in as normal

At that point it started working again, showing the default app-specific stuff which I hate, but at least it wasn't blank. And then it showed up under System Settings, Keyboard, Touch Bar Settings...

I'm not sure if the reboot into Recovery and running of First Aid made any difference, but it certainly can't hurt.

A simple shut down / reboot did nothing for me, but this method you outlined here did. Thanks!