Fitness giant Garmin was forced to shut down its website and services after a ransomware attack encrypted the company's internal network. The outage affects both Garmin.com and Garmin Connect, the service that allows owners of the company's smart devices to download and analyze exercise data. The incident also affected the company's ability to operate its call centers, meaning Garmin is unable to receive or respond to calls, emails or chat messages from its customers. According to Downdetector data, the Garmin outage remains in effect, more than 24 hours since users first encountered problems syncing their data.
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(Image credit: Downdetector)
Garmin breakdown
When Garmin Connect users encountered problems uploading their data to Garmin's servers, they received a message explaining that the service was down for maintenance. The company then tweeted that it was experiencing an outage affecting its services, website, and mobile app, but offered no further explanation. Garmin has yet to confirm that ransomware is the cause of the outage, but several employees of the US-based company have called the incident a ransomware attack on social media. Some staff members have even gone so far as to attribute the attack to a specific strain of ransomware, WastedLocker, that just arrived on the scene. While the extent of the damage is unclear, Garmin is planning a maintenance window of several days, which suggests the attack was quite severe and the outage will likely last a bit longer. The outage sparked concerns among some Garmin users that driving, running and swimming data could be lost. However, this is not the case, and exercise data can still be pulled from wearable devices and manually uploaded to third-party platforms, such as Strava. via ZDNet