Your description fits my experience 10/10 — it matches exactly what’s happened to me, down to the details.
For context, this has happened to me maybe five times over the past two years, always during soundchecks (so I’ve been lucky). I still haven’t figured out the exact cause.
Just last week, I did an 8-band festival plus two other gigs back-to-back — no issues whatsoever. The console ran for 12 hours straight, under the hot sun, without a single problem.
The last time this freeze happened, I was setting up the PA and had extra time, so I used the opportunity to observe what really happens. I left the console running and noticed that while the controls were completely frozen, audio continued to pass for about 10 minutes. After that, audio stopped entirely and I had to do a full cold restart. As you mentioned, doing a soft shutdown just leads to it booting back into the same error state.
From what we’ve seen, the best workaround so far is to do a cold restart as soon as possible. After that, the console usually runs just fine for the rest of the gig.
We also confirmed that this issue happens on both firmware versions 1.61 and 1.62, and we both use the same AR stageboxes. In my case, there was never a power outage, but I have sometimes disconnected and reconnected the stageboxes shortly before the issue occurred. So, there’s a possibility the stageboxes are related?
One more question: when this happened to you, did you have Mixing Station connected to the board? If so, which router were you using?
I recently ordered the new QU-5, which I like a lot — but I’m still really frustrated by this issue. The GLD is such a solid and powerful console for its age… I’d honestly never consider selling it.