Garmin Outage: What We Know About This Apparent Ransomware Attack

This week Garmin services and production were reportedly the victim of a ransomware attack. As a result, Garmin experienced an outage that affected Garmin.com and Garmin Connect, as well as Garmin call centers. This attack's various hits meant that at the same time Garmin was experiencing what was likely the most comprehensive loss of service in its history, the company was completely unable to reieve service calls, emails, or participate in online chats.

As of July 23, 2020, Garmin shut down a wide variety of services in order to handle a ransomware attack. Garmin's services seemed to be the victim of a "new strain of ransomware that appeared earlier this year, called WastedLocker" according to ZDNet. UPDATE: ZDNet suggested that they've "not been able to verify these claims during interviews with Garmin employees, and this remains just speculation, at this point in time."

Per a report on ITHome, Garmin suggested in an internal email that Garmin production lines would be "shut down for 2 days." That includes July 24th (Friday) and July 25th (Saturday). Garmin customer service center call lines are also down and appear to be staying down through Saturday.

If you're using a Garmin watch, connect your watch to your computer via USB. Browse on your PC to your device's Activities Directory and find your latest ".fit" file. Save this file to your computer and/or upload it to a secondary service if you do so wish – easy as pie!

Meanwhile, stay tuned as we continue to investigate. We do not know at this time if any personal information or data was visible to 3rd party attackers, if anything was stolen, or what Garmin's plan will be for the immediate future. We'll let you know when we find out!

[DEVELOPING]