This happened but some users may not have noticed the cyberattack that made Garmin Connect and other Garmin systems to be offline for a few days. No mention if the Garmin Pay service was affected but there are no reports of stolen information yet. The company has been working to bring the systems back and some services are slowly returning. Garmin confirmed the incident and it’s good the company acted right away. Systems are not yet fully restored but efforts are continuous.
An official statement was released by Garmin: “Garmin Ltd. was the victim of a cyberattack 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.”
It was considered a cyberattack and there is no word on the culprit yet. The company also said, “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 on our operations or financial results because of this outage.”
No user data were compromised but they are said to be locked away from the owners. It’s just that they cannot be easily accessed by those who are supposed to access them.
If you’re a Garmin user, know that your device can still collect data. You can just synchronize them to the Garmin Connect cloud, at least, at the moment. Some services are slowly coming back online but still not complete. Don’t expect lederboard stats to be updated just yet. There may be a delay.
Any uploaded data or activities may experience a delay in being updated or synchronized. This may include integration with third-party services like Strava. It’s not really clear what happened but Garmin wants answers and solutions so similar attacks can be prevented. Cloud services are held ransom so we know another party or group is involved.
