Stuck at Firmware Upgrade Process

[twalls]

Greetings everyone! I'm new to the Asus world of networking, so please be gentle. However, I'm not new to this sort of stuff in general (just spent four months with a Netgear R7000, DD-WRT, etc.)

I just got a new RT-AC68U out of the box from Amazon. Was very happy with how smoothly everything was going until I got to the end of the QIS wizard. It offered to throw on the latest firmware update. Typically, I'd download manually, but I'm thinking what's the harm? Sigh... It has said "Firmware is upgrading. Please wait about 3 minutes." for about 20 minutes now, and it is still at 0%.

I keep wishing if there was a download error, etc., that it would just fail and let me finish things up. As it is now, I'm afraid to try to interrupt the process manually. I'm not seeing any pop-ups or any other notifications that I might have missed. It is just sitting there doing nothing. I'm seeing barely any activity on the network port/modem lights. It looks like I have A2 revision hardware, and it was manufactured in 2014 (I'd hope it would be by this point).

Anyone else seen this problem before? Is there a safe way to stop things at this point? I would appreciate any help, advice, etc. I can get on how to proceed with this.

 

[philmiami]

sounds as if the servers to asus are
down/route is down

FOR ME I would do/my suggestion is to power off the router
unplug/wait 5 mins and plug it back up
BUT also read on resetting the NVRAM (hold the WPS button 30 seconds after reboot/power on I THINK) When all else fails READ THE INSTRUCTIONS

It should reboot/start like new again this time do NOT let it "automatically" upgrade

If it's stuck at 0% then it has not begun writing the new firmware

These are just the steps I would do

 

[twalls]

Thanks! On a hunch, I ended up using the link in the top-left to go back to the main screen (the one you'd normally use to skip the wizard). It went to the network map page, and I was able to start the firmware upgrade again manually. This time it worked like a charm. No idea what the hiccup was before. Just for reference, it shipped with 374_4561.

 

[philmiami]

I use a older version of RMerlin's firmware
it is the best and stable
on my 68U
I don't get what people want to upgrade firmware to dumb up the ability to do custom settings of the router but if that's what someone wants then that's what people do