Garmin has just posted a news release admitting that it was a victim of a cyberattack. Here’s the relevant part:
Garmin Ltd., today announced it was the victim of a cyber attack that encrypted some of our systems on July 23, 2020. As a result, many of our online services were interrupted including website functions, customer support, customer facing applications, and company communications. We immediately began to assess the nature of the attack and started remediation. We have no indication that any customer data, including payment information from Garmin Pay™, was accessed, lost or stolen. Additionally, the functionality of Garmin products was not affected, other than the ability to access online services.
Affected systems are being restored and we expect to return to normal operation over the next few days. We do not expect any material impact to our operations or financial results because of this outage. As our affected systems are restored, we expect some delays as the backlog of information is being processed. We are grateful for our customers’ patience and understanding during this incident and look forward to continuing to provide the exceptional customer service and support that has been our hallmark and tradition.
Well, this is better than what Garmin had been doing up until this point. Which is to not have that much communication with their customer base. In my testing with my Garmin Edge 830 cycling computer along with the Garmin Connect app I can confirm that some of the functionality is working. Specifically:
- I can see my activity history again in Garmin Connect. Though I am missing a cycling activity from Thursday that is thankfully present in Strava. Because, if it is not in Strava, it didn’t happen.
- Syncing from my Edge 830 isn’t working. None of the activities that I see in Garmin Connect isn’t syncing down to the Edge 830.
- There are still error messages in Garmin Connect saying that they are still down which isn’t a surprise as Garmin has made it clear that it will take days to fully bring things online.
The thing is that this will not likely keep people from asking questions about what happened, and more importantly what Garmin is going to do to make sure that this doesn’t happen again. I suspect that we might get those answers on Wednesday when Garmin releases their quarterly statement.
UPDATE: If you want to check the status of Garmin’s various services that are related to Garmin Connect, click here to see their status page.