EDMONTON -- Technology company Garmin expects its services to return to normal in the coming days following a prolonged outage caused by a cyberattack that affected its fitness tracking, aviation and commercial travel services, as well as its customer support network.
In a statement issued Monday, the company confirmed the large-scale outage was caused by a cyberattack that encrypted its systems last week, forcing some of its website functions, customer support, applications, and company communications offline.
The company noted no customer data or payment information appears to have been accessed, lost, or stolen as a result of the attack.
“We have no indication that any customer data, including payment information from Garmin Pay, was accessed, lost or stolen. Additionally, the functionality of Garmin products was not affected, other than the ability to access online services,” read the statement.
“Affected systems are being restored and we expect to return to normal operation over the next few days.”
While some apps and services had been restored Monday, the company noted it would take “a few days” to restore all operations. Customers are also being warned that there may be some delays as a backlog of information is processed.
The outage affected the company’s Garmin Connect fitness tracking applications and its aviation database services, flyGarmin, which supports aviation navigational equipment. The company’s customer service lines were also cut, leaving Garmin unable to take any calls, emails or online chats during the outage.
As of Monday afternoon, some Garmin Connect features had been restored, including the ability to upload activity summaries, device dashboard reports, and Garmin Golf applications. Garmin Aviation apps are also fully restored.
Connectivity to Strava, a popular run and cycling tracking app, is still limited.
Although Garmin Connect was not accessible during the outage, the company notes that activity, health and wellness data was still collected from and stored on customer devices.
The company says it anticipates that users will be able to synch that data with Garmin Connect once service is restored.
