Display Stopped Updating: What to Check
How to tell a normal refresh interval from a genuine fault when a screen keeps showing the same flights, and what to do in each case.
Display Stopped Updating: What to Check
A screen in the lobby has been showing the same flights for a while and you want to know whether something is broken. This article helps you tell normal behaviour apart from a real fault, and tells you what to do in each case. Work through it in order: the first two sections resolve most reports without anyone touching the screen.
First: how often the board is supposed to refresh at all
LobbyFlight fetches flight data on an interval that comes with your plan. Basic refreshes once an hour, Pro every 30 minutes, and Premium every five minutes. The interval is set by the subscription and cannot be changed in the portal, so on a Basic plan a board that shows identical flights for 55 minutes is doing exactly what it is supposed to do.
Two other things on the screen run on their own clocks, which is worth knowing before you diagnose anything:
The footer shows a Last updated timestamp. It is set each time the screen receives a response from the server, so compare it against your plan's interval before deciding anything is wrong.
Second: check the display status in the portal
Go to Displays in the portal. Every screen shows a status, and this is a faster and more reliable check than walking into the lobby.
Each running display sends a heartbeat every five minutes. The portal marks a display Offline only after twelve minutes without one — two missed beats plus some slack, so that a screen which merely stuttered is not reported as dead. That also means a screen you just switched off will still read as Showing for up to twelve minutes.
The other statuses are worth reading carefully, because two of them are not faults:
One caveat: the Open on this device action opens a preview of the display, and a preview deliberately does not send heartbeats. Checking a screen from your laptop therefore does not make the screen in the lobby look alive, which is the point — but it also means previewing is not a way to bring an offline display back.
What a stalled board actually looks like
If the interval and the portal status both look wrong, look at what the screen is showing. There are three distinct pictures, and they have different causes.
A red error card. When the browser cannot reach the flight API, the board is replaced by a card reading *Connection Error* / *Unable to load flight data* with a Try Again button. The previously shown flights disappear — old data is not kept on screen. Press Try Again to retry immediately; otherwise the screen retries on its own at the next scheduled refresh. This picture almost always means the device lost its network connection.
Demo flights. If the request reaches the server but the server cannot get real flight data, the API answers with demo flights instead of an error. The screen accepts them as a normal response, so the Last updated timestamp keeps moving while the flights on the board are fictional. A "frozen" screen that is really showing invented flight numbers is this case, and it is covered in Display Shows Demo Data Instead of Real Flights.
A genuinely frozen page. The clock has stopped, nothing on the screen animates, and the browser may report the page as unresponsive. Nothing in LobbyFlight can recover from this, because the browser is no longer running the page. Close the browser completely, reopen it, and load the display address again. If this recurs, treat it as a device problem and see the sections on kiosk mode and power management below.
Is the screen even on the right address?
Every display has its own address. For hotels with more than one screen, the address includes a display parameter — /display/<hotel-id>?display=<display-id> — and each display carries its own configuration. A screen opened on an older address without that parameter will show a different, possibly outdated configuration, which looks a lot like a screen that stopped updating. Hotels on a verified custom domain get their own domain as the display address instead.
Because of this, never type the address by hand or reuse one from an old note. Open Displays, use Copy address on the relevant display card, and paste that into the browser on the screen. The same applies if you start the browser in kiosk mode from a command line or a startup script: the address in that command must be the one the portal hands you.
Also check whether you are looking at a preview rather than the display itself. The thumbnails in the portal, and any address ending in preview=1, are deliberately still: rotation, auto-scroll, language switching and configuration polling are all turned off, because six animating thumbnails in one portal page cost more than they are worth. A motionless preview is not a frozen display.
Configuration changes arrive by themselves
The display re-reads its configuration every 20 seconds, and when you save a change in the portal the affected screens are told to reload the page in full. So a screen that seems to reload spontaneously is behaving correctly, and there is normally no reason to walk over and reload it manually after changing a setting. If a configuration change has not appeared after a minute or so, the screen is not reaching the server — go back to the error card and network checks above.
When the device or the network is the cause
If the page freezes repeatedly rather than once, the cause is usually below LobbyFlight.
Check that the device itself is still online and that other devices on the same network are working; restarting the router is a reasonable early step. On the firewall side, allowing the LobbyFlight domain over HTTPS is necessary but not sufficient: hotel logos and airline logos are served from a separate blob storage domain, and white-label hotels run on their own domain entirely. The full list of domains and ports is in Configure Network and Firewall.
For the device, 2 GB of RAM is the minimum and 4 GB is recommended for a screen that runs continuously; the full list is in System Requirements. Browsers also throttle tabs that are not in the foreground, which can slow or skip scheduled refreshes, so the display should be the only tab and should never sit behind another window. Running the browser in kiosk mode avoids that entirely and is described in Activate Kiosk Mode for 24/7 Operation. Screens that go dark or fall asleep on their own are a power settings matter, covered in Power Management and Screensaver Configuration.
If you need to contact support
Send a photo or screenshot of what the screen is actually showing — the error card, demo flights or a stopped clock are three different problems and the picture tells us which. Add the display name as it appears in the portal, the address the device has open, your plan, and roughly when the screen was last correct.