Learn how to restart the menu bar on your Mac if it’s frozen, unresponsive, or malfunctioning, where clicking the icons doesn’t trigger any actions.
If the dreaded beach ball appears when you hover over your Mac’s menu bar, force-quitting the misbehaving app that’s causing problems should fix it. If that doesn’t help, however, you’ll need to nuke the menu bar out of orbit and restart it.
Icons on the right side of the menu bar are controlled by the SystemUIServer process, and killing it will cause the menu bar to restart. The tutorial below outlines two different methods of doing that, or you can watch our instructional video.
Restart the menu bar in Activity Monitor
- Open the Activity Monitor app in the Applications/Utilities folder or the Other folder in the Launchpad.
- Select the Memory tab in the window toolbar, then type “SystemUIServer” into the search box in the top-right corner.
- Select the SystemUIServer process in search results, then hit the X button in the window’s toolbar and confirm by choosing Force Quit.
Refresh a stuck menu bar using Terminal
You can also kill the process controlling the menu bar by opening the Terminal app from the Applications/Utilities folder, pasting this command, and pressing Enter.
killall -KILL SystemUIServer
This command is good to have in your back pocket. Running it will let you get back to your work without having to pause everything to restart the computer.
Relaunch the Finder
If macOS won’t register your clicks in the Finder or an app’s menu, relaunching the Finder should fix it. Otherwise, try restarting your computer.
Supercharge the menu bar
The macOS menu bar is a useful feature, but there’s more to it than meets the eye. The whole point of the menu bar is to provide convenient one-click access to common options such as showing the emoji picker or changing the volume.
By default, macOS hides the menu bar when using apps in fullscreen mode, but you can reveal it. You can even show your name in the menu bar for personalization.
Have you ever encountered problems on your Mac, like the menu bar freezing? If so, sound off in the comments down below to share your experience.