Garmin down: Connect online service finally coming back up after days-long outage

Many tools still do not appear to be working as normal, but Strava says activities 'have begun to upload'

"Garmin" sails out of the CYCA in preparation for the 2017 Sydney to Hobart on December 26, 2017 in Sydney, Australia (Brett Hemmings/Getty Images)

Garmin's Connect service appears to be finally, slowly coming back online, allowing its devices to be useful once more.

The online tools are still not working as they should, and do not appear to be entirely reliable even when they do connect. Large parts of the company's online tools are not working at all, and if they are they may be hit by bugs.

But activity tracking website Strava reported that Garmin uploads were finally starting to come through, and some users were able to make their phones at least partially sync with their devices.

The Garmin outage began early on Thursday, when users found that the company's suite of online tools – from its Connect service for devices to even its website and customer service calls centres – were offline. Because its devices from smartwatches to aviation tools need to speak to that Connect service to work, users found themselves unable to syncronise their runs, create new routes, or download important updates.

The problems have been ongoing for the past five days, with Garmin giving little information on when the outage would be over or what may have caused it in the first place. It issued an update over the weekend in which it assured users there was "no indication" that data had been either stolen or removed, and that their devices should start working as normal again once service is resumed.

On Monday morning, some users found that there activities had appeared on Strava and that they could see data on the Garmin Connect Mobile app that had been missing since the outage began. The app still showed an error page and many functions appeared not to be working, but the service was more functional than it has been since the outage began.

Garmin's Connect status page – which, during the outage, showed a wall of red error messages – showed that some services were coming back online on Monday morning, though it noted that some parts of the online tools are still down. But sometimes the page refused to load at all.

Strava's support page indicated that Connect was back online and that as a result activities would start syncing to the service.

"Garmin Connect has resumed service and delayed activities have begun to upload to Strava," a message on its support page read.

It told users that there may be a delay of "a week or longer" in activities appearing on the site, because of the huge volume of uploads expected to hit when Strava's systems come back online.

It also redirected users to the instructions for manually uploading any rides that are yet to appear, and made clear that it will recognise any uploads that are done that way, so that they will not be duplicated once the online service comes back online.