Fitness giant Garmin has been 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 firm’s smart devices to upload and analyze exercise data.
The incident has 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.
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According to data from Downdetector, the Garmin outage remains in effect, over 24 hours since users first encountered issues synchronizing their data.
Garmin outage
When Garmin Connect users first ran into problems uploading their data to Garmin servers, they were served a message explaining the service was down for maintenance.
The company later tweeted that it was experiencing an outage that affected its services, website and mobile app, but offered no further explanation.
Garmin has not yet confirmed that ransomware is the source of the outage, but multiple employees of the US-based firm have referred to the incident as a ransomware attack on social media.
Some staff even went as far as to attribute the attack to a specific ransomware strain, WastedLocker, which has only very recently arrived on the scene.
Although the extent of the damage is unclear, Garmin reportedly anticipates a multi-day maintenance period, suggesting the attack was rather severe and that the outage will likely endure for a little while yet.
The outage has led to fears among some Garmin users that ride, run and swim data might be lost. However, this is not the case, and exercise data can still be extracted from wearables and uploaded manually to third party platforms - such as Strava.
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Via ZDNet
