2017 MacBook Air frozen

[gogreen1]

All of sudden, my MacBook Air isn't responding to keyboard commands--restart, shutdown, force quit applications all don't work. When I try to start an app, nothing happens or a window flashes on the screen that says the app I'm trying to access interrupted restart. That window flashes by so quickly I had to keep trying so that I could read the window contents. There were choices there, but the window disappears too quickly to do anything. Any ideas what happened and what to do?

 

[4sallypat]

Hold the power button down for 3 seconds to force shutdown.
Restart the computer in Safe mode.

 

[gogreen1]

Thanks, 4sallypat! That did the trick. I'm guessing that safe mode's cache-cleaning must have cleared the problem. Otherwise, what could it have been? Thanks again!

 

[Erehy Dobon]

What were you doing when this occurred? What has recently changed on your computer? Operating system? Apps, utilities, browser extensions?

Is there a crash log in Console? If so, what does it say?

Is this the first time it has happened?

If it happens again, I suggest you create a brand new user account, log into that and see if the crash occurs again. If it does not, that would point to something bad in your regular user account.

If it still happens in the newly created user account, I suggest installing a fresh copy of macOS onto an external drive and boot from that. If it still continues to crash, that would seem to point to a hardware fault.

That's the most I can say. You are going to need to provide a lot more information before anyone can point you to a place to start.

I hereby bow out of this discussion.