The IT Nerd

Athletes and wanna-be athletes like me who use Garmin devices like cycling computers and running watches rely on Garmin’s back end service which is Garmin Connect to upload their activities from their devices to places like Strava and Apple Health. That way they can analyze their efforts and plan their training. Plus because Strava has a social component, you can prove to your friends that you were actually out running or cycling.

Well, none of that is happening at the moment because according to Garmin, the Garmin Connect service has an “outage”. And if you try calling their call centers, you won’t get through as they are affected by the same “outage”:

Now you will note that I put the word “outage” in quotes. That’s because they’ve actually been hit by ransomware and they likely don’t want to admit it according to The Guardian:

The company has not officially said it was a ransomware attack. However company employees writing on social media after the incident all described it as such.

The Taiwanese tech news site iThome published an internal memo from Garmin’s IT staff to its Taiwan factories announcing two days of maintenance on Friday and Saturday, which sources told the website was caused by a “virus”.

Garmin also makes car and aviation navigation systems as well, and those services are down too leaving pilots and drivers in limbo. Thus this is very very bad for Garmin to say the least. And bad for Garmin customers like my wife and I. After all, it in’t clear if customer info was stolen for example. Thus when Garmin gets everything up and running again, assuming that they can do so, they have some explaining to do if they ever expect to regain the trust of their customers.

UPDATE: If you have a Garmin running or cycling device and you need to upload your workouts to Strava while Garmin sorts itself out, this video will help you to do that. Because if your workout isn’t on Strava, it didn’t happen:

UPDATE #2: Bleeping Computer has confirmed that Garmin was hit by the “WastedLocker” ransomware. Because of that, I would not expect Garmin systems to be operational anytime soon. Related to this, you can expect Apple Watch, Fitbit and Wahoo sales to skyrocket as a result of this now well publicized incident.

UPDATE #3: As of Monday morning EST, Garmin’s services are now starting to come on line. The key word is starting as there is still significant functionality that isn’t working. But you now seem to be able to log into Garmin Connect and upload workouts. So that’s a start.

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