I have a very frustrating issue. My laptop (an ASUS VivoBook K570) randomly drops all USB devices and the ports become unresponsive. I lose my mouse, keyboard, headphones and controller all in one fell swoop, and unplugging and re-plugging them in does not fix the issue. As my touchpad also doesn't work (that's my fault for not hooking it up correctly last time I opened it up and added an SSD), I have to use the laptop's keyboard to cycle through the menu and select restart.

The reboot connects all the devices again. I am on Linux Mint 20.3 Cinnamon, and if I recall correctly, it doesn't matter what distro I have installed, it still happens.

Any help would be appreciated.

UPDATE: Thanks to the suggestion by several people, I looked at dmesg and /var/log/syslog and found the problem and a potential solution here: https://techoverflow.net/2021/09/16/how-i-fixed-xhci-host-controller-not-responding-assume-dead/

I made a script to execute the unbind and bind commands for the USB hubs I found in my logs and next time it happens, I will try and execute the script and see what happens.