Garmin outage shuts down fitness service, call centers

Garmin’s fitness-tracking service has been down for at least a day — a massive outage that may have been caused by a cyberattack.

The smartwatch and GPS maker first confirmed Thursday morning that the outage had disabled its Garmin Connect service, which lets users track their workouts and personal health data through a smartphone app. The service was still not functional as of Friday morning.

Users of Garmin’s wearable fitness devices griped on social media that they couldn’t track and share their runs, walks or bike rides during the outage. Garmin said the problem also affected its call centers, meaning it could not field phone calls, emails or online chats from users.

“We are working to resolve this issue as quickly as possible and apologize for this inconvenience,” the Kansas-based company said on Twitter.

Garmin has not said what caused the outage. But some employees have blamed it on a ransomware attack that encrypted Garmin’s “internal network and some production systems,” tech news website ZDNet reported.

Some Garmin departments in Taiwan received a notice saying that “internal IT servers and databases were attacked and production lines were also suspended” for two days, according to iThome, a Taiwanese tech publication.

The suspected attack also disabled flyGarmin, which supports Garmin’s navigational devices for airplanes, and the Garmin Pilot app that’s used to plan and schedule flights, according to ZDNet. Pilots told the site that they couldn’t download a version of Garmin’s aviation database to their navigation systems.

Garmin did not immediately respond to an email from The Post asking about the cause of the outage and when the company expects to resolve it.

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