Fitness tracker titan Garmin has been plagued by a powerful global outage that has shut down the company’s website, disrupted production lines, and prevents users from uploading activities.
In a statement posted on Garmin and Garmin Connect, the company said, “We are currently experiencing an outage affecting Garmin.com and Garmin Connect. This outage also affects our call centers, and we are currently unable to receive any calls, emails or online chat. We are working to resolve this issue as quickly as possible and apologize for this inconvenience. “
The outage occurred around 3 a.m.Thursday (UTC), which was approaching 24 hours ago, and there is still no indication from Garmin as to when normal service will resume. The company has sent a notification to some users that “they will perform system maintenance at 5 pm [UTC, Friday] it lasts approximately four hours, “which takes the interruption time to a second day.
ZDNet reports that Garmin employees have claimed on social media that the company was the victim of a ransomware attack, where malicious hackers encrypt a company’s data and hold them hostage until a ransom is paid, usually in bitcoin. . Canyon was also the victim of a similar attack earlier this year.
Garmin has not provided formal confirmation that this has taken place, referring to the issue more nebulous as a “cut” or “maintenance”. However, Taiwanese tech website ITHome reports that the company’s manufacturing facility in Taiwan will be idle for two full days of work, with internal notes referring to a “virus,” without specifically naming ransomware.
There are unconfirmed reports that the ransomware variety used is EvilCorp’s WastedLocker, which is primarily targeted at corporations based in the US Security companies believe the group is based in Russia.
There are a number of troubling implications for Garmin users beyond the fact that activities cannot be synced to Strava at the moment (and as such did not happen). The company sells hiking trackers and provides equipment for the automotive and aviation industries, places where it really doesn’t want things to go wrong, and it keeps confidential data from its millions of users.
CyclingTips has contacted Garmin for comment, but has not yet received a response.
Meanwhile, riders using Garmin can save the trip data manually via USB, just navigate to your activity directory, save the relevant .fit or .gpx file to your desktop and upload it from there to your preferred activity tracking service .
