diff --git a/CHANGES.txt b/CHANGES.txt
index 847e7729b1..75b05ea2b5 100644
--- a/CHANGES.txt
+++ b/CHANGES.txt
@@ -338,6 +338,7 @@
  * Make stop-server.bat wait for Cassandra to terminate (CASSANDRA-14829)
  * Correct sstable sorting for garbagecollect and levelled compaction (CASSANDRA-14870)
 Merged from 3.0:
+ * Fix cassandra-stress write hang with default options (CASSANDRA-14616)
  * Netty epoll IOExceptions caused by unclean client disconnects being logged at INFO (CASSANDRA-14909)
  * Unfiltered.isEmpty conflicts with Row extends AbstractCollection.isEmpty (CASSANDRA-14588)
  * RangeTombstoneList doesn't properly clean up mergeable or superseded rts in some cases (CASSANDRA-14894)
diff --git a/tools/stress/src/org/apache/cassandra/stress/StressAction.java b/tools/stress/src/org/apache/cassandra/stress/StressAction.java
index 34e0d8c71f..3268182342 100644
--- a/tools/stress/src/org/apache/cassandra/stress/StressAction.java
+++ b/tools/stress/src/org/apache/cassandra/stress/StressAction.java
@@ -104,7 +104,11 @@ public class StressAction implements Runnable
     private void warmup(OpDistributionFactory operations)
     {
         // do 25% of iterations as warmup but no more than 50k (by default hotspot compiles methods after 10k invocations)
-        int iterations = Math.min(50000, (int) (settings.command.count * 0.25)) * settings.node.nodes.size();
+        int iterations = (settings.command.count >= 0
+                          ? Math.min(50000, (int)(settings.command.count * 0.25))
+                          : 50000) * settings.node.nodes.size();
+        if (iterations <= 0) return;
+
         int threads = 100;
 
         if (settings.rate.maxThreads > 0)