Garmin Outage Persists After 24 Hours Downtime
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> Pilots told the tech website that they had not been able to download new Garmin software with up-to-date versions of the aviation database, which is a legal requirement for flying. The Garmin Pilot app, which is used to schedule and plan flights, was also hit by the attack.
Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23937097
PS in case you’re not into aviation - Garmin is used in smaller aircraft, not airliners but this is still a significant disruption - smaller planes and helicopters carry out important roles such as firefighting, heli ambulance, flying doctors services (e.g. in Australia) rescue ops etc.
So this outage could be painful for some corporate flight departments and air taxi companies as well. Luckily you can also print the charts without that much trouble and fly like the old days.
Absolute worst case, if you were flying IFR and it was worth the expense, you could go to Jeppesen and buy a 1-off update for your avionics. Garmin Pilot could be replaced by a ForeFlight trial, etc. It’s not like Garmin goes down, planes are grounded.
I'd be willing to bet that their legal and finance teams are fighting to keep them from saying anything (their earnings call is on the 29th).
So much goodwill is lost by companies that don't communicate when problems are affecting customers.
I'm sure any communication will have to minimize stockholder impact and will be watered down instead of being 'Oh shit, all of our crap is encrypted'
That is simply false. I'm fine with people making that claim about companies like Facebook and Google - they make most of their money selling advertising, so yes, in that sense, their users are a product they are offering to advertisers. But that's not how Garmin works.
Garmin provides products to us, and offers services that they hope will keep us in their ecosystem. Unless you have reasonable evidence that they are lying in their privacy polices, such as at https://www.garmin.com/en-US/privacy/connect/ , then you cannot reasonably make the claim you have made.
It's not a unique POV for a company to have, it's just it's maybe more a subject of laser focus for companies in this era.
The customers has to do a informed choice.
And here we are a full day and a half into the outage and no update and no ETA, just the same generic "Sorry, we have an outage bro" message that they put up a few hours in. I guess if this really is WastedLocker they're just sitting around arguing over whether to pay the ransom.
Yes true, the screen bigger and buttons less smush'i :-)
That being said it looks like OP might be German and I've never heard anyone using the term die Säule in this context.
I would take a guess that they are drawing a distinction between rechargeable and disposable batteries.
A couple important excerpts (there's a lot more detail in the article):
> ... flyGarmin has also been down today. This is Garmin's web service that supports the company's line of aviation navigational equipment.
Other HN commenters have already elaborated on the implications of that.
> ... while we confirmed that this is a ransomware attack, we could not 100% verify claims that this was caused by WastedLocker.
Garmin hasn't officially commented on the cause, but they did tweet that their call centers are down (https://twitter.com/Garmin/status/1286278816302850048):
> This outage also affects our call centers, and we are currently unable to receive any calls, emails or online chats. We are working to resolve this issue as quickly as possible and apologize for this inconvenience. (2/2)
"inReach SOS and messaging continue to work."
"inReach SOS and messaging have been fully functional and remain so."
This is reassuring because people who go to remote places and rely on the inReach satellite SOS and messaging have not been affected. If they had been affected, they would've been cut off with no explanation--for example unable to relay status to family, or to request an early pickup. While not in itself life-threatening, it would cause a lot of unnecessary worry and possibly unnecessary rescues.
I had wondered if their satellite messages was affected. Obviously, a message goes from the unit in the field to a ground-station, and then to the recipient's regular messaging or email. The question is whether it touched one of Garmin's servers to do that, and if that server was affected--apparently not.
The rest of their services clearly had as little spent on them as possible to "maximise shareholder return".
In fact the billing is completely separate.
You can send SOS and tracking points, and send/receive messages. But you can't get new courses and/or maps onto the device.
1. https://www.zdnet.com/article/garmin-services-and-production...
My airplane is grounded for IFR flights — I always fly IFR. I pay Garmin $865/year for subscription. There are thousands of aircraft in the same predicament.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23775957
In this case I hate to be proven right, but it's not looking good for Garmin. There's lots of road cyclists out there with $750 useless watches now. I can tell you that after this event the odds of me ever purchasing a Garmin device that relies on anything 'cloud' based have even further decreased.
Even if the watches can function offline, how can anybody have any degree of trust that all of their previously uploaded data has not been stolen? Based on the reported use of ransomware and the very lengthy downtime, it really sounds like Garmin's network was owned quite thoroughly. Is there some group out there now in possession of hundreds of thousands of .gpx files with detailed tracking points of peoples' residences, favorite running and cycling routes, and what times of the day they're usually away from home? Nobody knows.
After seeing 20+ years and many dozens of instances of data breaches from this that we would now define as 'the cloud', I find that the only solution is to simply not upload to a third party anything you consider proprietary information.
Meanwhile my fully offline or local-workstation-hosted GPX based tracking method continues to work normally.
They work offline. At least, as much as I use mine it still functions, there may be more advanced features.
> Meanwhile my fully offline or local-workstation-hosted GPX based tracking method continues to work normally.
You can still get the gpx files right off the watch. Apart from that, this is the classic Hacker News argument of "why do the normies rely on these cloud services it's trivial to <insert giant complicated setup here>".
It's awesome that it works for you. My parents, one of whom in his retirement hacks on code that combines local drone captured data with local government LIDAR data and parses it for more accurate maps of his lifestyle block, don't have time for those shenanagins. The expectation that everyone does is folly
If I really wanted to automate it, I would use some sort of tool to do the equivalent of a cron job to scp the files from the contents of /sdcard/bike/*.gpx to my desktop PC.
The online features that aren't currently working involve syncing wirelessly with your phone and their servers, and more uniquely analytics on training (effectiveness, recovery, records, etc.) that your method doesn't seem to offer.
True, but some devices (like the Fenix 6 lineup) don't mount as USB mass storage.
For those, Android File Transfer [0] seems to work.
On your system though: what happens if your computer crashes, gets a virus or you otherwise lose the data? You should probably have a backup system right? Now you're adding more steps, and either doing a reasonable complicated 321 setup manually, or back to involving the cloud.
I'm not saying what you're doing is bad, but dismissing easy to use cloud systems is just silly. Ironically I push my runs to the cloud (or clouds, as I go watch -> garmin -> strava) because it's an offsite backup that I don't have to manage. I also then export strava data and re-back it up myself, but I'm a tech nerd so that's just icing.
You're also side stepping any social features. I know people who are very encouraged to exercise because they see their friends doing it, or because they get kudos / likes and praise when they post their workouts. This may not be important to you but for many people it is.
I think what people are really trying to say is that the Connect app should have some sort of "Store my previous n number of Activities locally on my phone for offline viewing" option. These files are typically just a few MB and my Android phone has like 4X as much storage capacity as my Fenix watch. As it stands, I can't even execute a sync between my watch and my phone right now because their cloud is down and that's just ridiculous.
The watch has every run from the past 2 years on it. I want that information on my phone as well.
(Like the device could share the data over Wifi/Bluetooth)
Not sure if "tracking an activity" only is really considered "working offline". Customization of the devices is a major functionality of GARMIN products and ONLY works with a "Connect connection". Even changing the watch face is not possible, sometimes the watch tries to "verify Connect IQ Apps" which is not possible and you have to restart the watch, to detail just two major nuisances. Not even mentioning people who bought a GARMIN device since the outage started and did not know about it - they are currently proud owners of expensive paperweights and dust collectors. Look out for many pre-owned GARMIN products on eBay in the coming days and weeks!
It IS frustrating - I have a Fenix 3, so I can relate. But it is still tracking the activities and the service will be back up, so saying that the watches are useless right now is rather hyperbolic.
It's scary how much we became dependent on internet connectivity.
Yeah it’s called anyone who goes on Strava.
I can also still sync Spotify for my music and podcasts, so that works.
You don't have a need for a 750 dollar watch with dedicated onboard maps and gps unless your use case is specifically being outside of coverage areas to start with.
That's why sometimes companies will make statements like "we have no evidence that the hackers did Y1, Y2 or Y3". It doesn't mean anything really.
That is to say, once Garmin becomes communicative again, they may be prescriptive in answering questions like yours head-on, or due to lack of concrete proof, punt and obfuscate.
Suffice to say, it appears they've been owned through-and-through, so you may want to err on the side of caution.
> Garmin has no indication that this outage has affected your data, including activity, payment or other personal information.