Having trouble getting your Garmin watch to sync with Garmin Connect? You’re not alone.
Early Thursday morning, Garmin experienced a major outage across its services, which is affecting the Garmin Connect mobile apps, website, and Garmin.com.
The outage began early in the morning UK time and has continued throughout the day. Garmin’s website indicates that the problem is a result of the site being down for maintenance, though does not say how long that will be last.
“We are currently experiencing an outage that affects Garmin Connect, and as a result, the Garmin Connect website and mobile app are down at this time,” Garmin wrote.
“This outage also affects our call centres, and we are currently unable to receive any calls, emails or online chats. We are working to resolve this issue as quickly as possible and apologise for this inconvenience.”
The company initially stated its servers were down for maintenance, though it soon followed up that comment with a more widespread service outage warning on Twitter.
The problems with those services also mean that a range of features can’t be used on Garmin’s own devices: it is not possible to create new routes to go running or cycling, for instance, or to share those activities on services like Strava once they are completed.
The devices themselves continue to work as normal with the data they do have, however, meaning that any data collected during the outage will be safe.
Several Garmin employees took to social media to share details about the attack, all calling it a ransomware attack.
Some Garmin employees speaking online attributed the incident to a new strain of ransomware that appeared earlier this year, called WastedLocker.
However, the incident appears to be much larger and more devastating than Garmin indicated via its initial statement.
It also remains unclear if any customer data has been lost or stolen during today’s incident. Over the past several months, ransomware gangs have modified their modus operandi to also include data theft besides file encryption.
Until Garmin manages to restore its services, users have now taken to social media sites to share tips with each other on how to save run and bike ride information to Garmin partner services, such as Strava, to avoid losing workout information.
