Garmin Outage Begins To Ease As Services Slowly Return
Garmin's huge outage is gradually starting to ease, with a number of the fitness company's connected services beginning to come back online after reportedly being the victim of a ransomeware attack. It's been a long weekend for the fitness wearables and navigation products firm, as it enters day four of Garmin Connect and other services being pushed unexpectedly offline.
As of Monday morning, though, the Garmin system status board is looking less sickly. What was a pretty uniform page of red outage warnings since July 23 is gradually turning into a sea of green and amber indicators instead, as Garmin brings some services back online.
The biggest is Garmin Connect, of course, and that's still online back with limited functionality. Users can now upload their activities, see the Garmin Dashboard, get reports, and register devices as normal. However other features aren't quite so full-functioned again yet: you can create challenges and view them, for example, but Garmin says that its leaderboards may be delayed.
Similarly, the daily summary can be viewed, but some data may not appear initially. Courses can be created, through both the web and mobile interfaces, but they're not syncing to actual devices, while third-party Courses using the API will be queued to sync. Garmin Coach supports new plans being created, but existing plans might be delayed in processing Activities and more.
One of the big concerns many Garmin wearers had was the integration with popular third-party platform Strava. At the moment, Strava Beacon integration is working, and both Segments and Routes are being queued to sync to devices. Uploaded Activities, meanwhile, are being sent to Strava, but that could be delayed. If you're really in a hurry to get your stats out, you may still want to use the manual workaround instead.
Garmin still isn't giving much in the way of detail regarding what, exactly, has been happening since the outage began late last week. In a statement from the company, it confirmed that the outage was underway, and that it not only impacted services like Garmin Connect but the company's call centers and customer support, leaving them unable to receive calls, emails, or online chat messages.
That shouldn't mean any lost data, though. "Although Garmin Connect is not accessible during the outage," the company said, "activity and health and wellness data collected from Garmin devices during the outage is stored on the device and will appear in Garmin Connect once the user syncs their device." There's also no indication that any data in the cloud has been impacted, nor payment or other personal details.
Reports have suggested that hackers demanded $10 million in order to release Garmin's systems. The company has not commented on the rumors of a cyberattack.
What users need to know is that it may not be instantaneous for their data to start flowing freely again, even after the Garmin service status board turns green once more. The company warned users that that it could be a week or more before things have settled down and all their activity progress has been synchronized to where it's meant to be.