What to Do When Your Amazon Fire TV Stick Keeps Buffering/Stopping [December 2020]

If you’re looking for a way to add smart TV functionality to an older television set—either one without any streaming services or one that has aged out of app updates for its platform—Amazon’s Fire TV line of devices is a fantastic addition. From Netflix and Hulu to HBO Max and Amazon’s own Prime service, there’s no shortage of media you can watch on your Fire TV, and since the device starts at just $29 for the Amazon Fire Stick Lite, it’s an affordable and easy to use option for anyone to set up.

Of course, like any gadget, your Fire Stick can and will run into bugs and issues. One of the most common problems that users encounter with their Fire Stick is repeated buffering issues, stopping their streams right in the middle of the latest season of Stranger Things or Big Mouth.

While this can be annoying, fortunately, it’s rarely a sign of any serious issue with your device. Instead, it typically comes down to problems with your internet connection not being fast enough to handle streaming over your network. Let’s take a look at how to diagnose and solve this issue.

Check Your Internet Speed

The first thing to check is the Internet connection speed that your Fire Stick has access to. Streaming video is fairly bandwidth intensive, and if your Internet connection isn’t up to par, then your Fire Stick may not be able to keep up with those Buffy episodes you’re blasting out. The main reason your Fire Stick might buffer is that it doesn’t have enough of the video stream loaded to keep playing, and it has to catch up.

Select your preferred browser in the Fire TV home menu and go to the search bar. If you haven’t installed a browser yet, then you can follow these steps to get access to the Silk browser.

1. Wake your television and your Fire Stick using the power button on your device’s remote.
   
2. Select the “Apps” tab from the home screen.
3. Select “Categories,” then select “Utility”
4. Choose the Silk Browser app.
5. Select the “Get” button.
6. Download and install the browser, then click “Open”.

You can use any Internet speed checker you like, but Fast.com is extremely simple, loads and runs automatically, and only checks your downstream speed, which is the only speed relevant for streaming video.

Run the test, and see where you come out.

How fast does it need to be? The absolute bare minimum to stream a single standard-definition video (while not doing anything else on your Internet connection) is 3 to 4 Mbps. If you want to stream high-definition video, you want at least 6 to 10 Mbps. 4K video streams need around 25 Mbps. If your Fire Stick doesn’t have that much bandwidth to play with, then it’s not going to give you a good video streaming experience.

It’s important to remember that you need to test the Internet speed from your Fire Stick, not at the router or elsewhere in your network. It doesn’t matter if your ISP provides you 100 Mbps at the router if your wireless connection to the Fire Stick only passes through 3 Mbps of that. Test at the TV set, not anywhere else.

Disable Collecting Application Data

Another possible source of slowdowns is the fact that your Fire Stick collects data from all applications installed on the device. This may be one of the things slowing it down. You can easily disable this option in Settings.

1. Select Settings in your Fire Stick menu.
2. Select Applications.
3. Select Collect App Usage Data.
4. Turn off Collect App Usage.

   

Tweak Your Preferences

There are some adjustments you can make to your Fire Stick that can optimize its overall performance, and this may help resolve buffering and freezing problems.

1.  Select Settings in your Fire TV menu.
2. Select Preferences.
3. Select Data Monitoring and turn it off.

   

4. Exit Data Monitoring.
5. Select Notification Settings.
6. Select App Notifications and turn off all notifications that you don’t actually need.
7. Exit Notification Settings.
8. Select Featured Content.
9. Turn off Allow Video Autoplay and Allow Audio Autoplay.

Uninstall Unnecessary Applications

It’s tempting to just install every cool application that you see on your Fire Stick, but it’s important to remember that the device is basically a computer. Just like any other computer, if you load it down with a lot of junk, it’s going to start running slowly and develop problems. If you have performance issues, simply uninstall all of the apps that you’re not using.

1. Select Settings in your Fire Stick menu.
2. Select Applications.
3. Select Manage Installed Applications.
4. Select an application and select the Uninstall option to remove the app.
5. Repeat this process for all the applications that you don’t actually use.

Remember that your Fire Stick includes a number of pre-installed apps, so even if you’re new to using Fire TV, you might need to look for pre-installed apps worth uninstalling.

Free Up Your Fire TV Stick RAM

If you run a lot of processes on your Fire Stick, it is likely to run out of RAM really quickly. Running out of RAM can cause the device to just stop or stay in an infinite buffer loop. You can easily free up the RAM via an app called Clean Master. Just download the Clean Master app, choose the Memory cleaning option and let the app optimize your Fire TV Stick.

Use a VPN Service

As I explained above, fast internet speed is crucial for a Fire Stick to operate smoothly. However, sometimes your Internet provider may be throttling your speed because it recognizes that you’re streaming video. Throttling is basically deliberate slowing down of your internet speed to minimize congestion. Luckily, you can easily work around throttling. Using a VPN service allows you to connect to a different server and avoid congestion and throttling.