Garmin down: Users still having problems with devices after outage, as company offers tips on how to fix them

Issues caused by devices failing to sync with Connect platform, company says

Cameron Meyer of Australia and Team Garmin-Cervelo celebrates on the podium as race winner after Stage Six of the 2011 Tour Down Under on January 23, 2011 in Adelaide, Australia (Morne de Klerk/Getty Images)

Some Garmin users are still having problems with their devices more than a week after a major outage.

The company's systems went offline on 23 July, after it was hit by a ransomware attack that shut down not only its services for consumers but also its customer support tools and website.

Some days after, Garmin reported that the cyber attack had been halted and that its systems were slowly coming back online. Since then, most of its services and features have come back online, but some users are still experiencing problems.

Particular issues have been reported by users who find they have finished an activity, go to save it within their watch, and discover that their device appears to get stuck, promising that it is "saving" the activity but in fact just whirling around and never actually moving on. The problem also means that the device will not show the distance covered while the activity is actually happening.

The only way to escape the loop appears to be to force the watch to shut down, which means losing any data that was recorded during the activity.

Garmin says the problem occurs when the device has not been properly synced recently, and doing so successfully with Connect service should stop the problem from happening in the future. Garmin specifically notes that the issue will be fixed by syncing twice.

The most reliable way to do so appears to be through the Garmin Express application that can be downloaded for Mac or PC. That can be installed from Garmin's website, and once that is done then plugging the device into the computer should force it to sync.

The device should then be disconnected and then plugged back in so that it can sync once more, which should fix the issue.

A similar problem is also resulting in devices not properly syncing wellness data, such as calories burnt or heart rate, Garmin said. And the fix is the same: two successful syncs with the Connect service should bring it back online, Garmin said.

The fixes were outlined in a support document that was posted through Garmin's official platforms.

Garmin's status page also suggests that some specific features are still experiencing issues. While most of the features are now "online", it notes that there remains problems with the "challenges" that can be created within the Garmin app, as well as delays in syncing data to third-party platforms.