Garmin shuts down services after alleged ransomware attack
Garmin has shut down various services after it was affected by an outage that was reportedly caused by a ransomware attack, ZDNet reports.
To deal with the issues affecting the company following the outage, Garmin has shut down its official website, Garmin Connect, its aviation database services, and some of its Asian production lines.
According to the company, this outage is also affecting its call centres, meaning it cannot answer queries from its users.
“We are currently experiencing an outage that affects Garmin Connect, and as a result, the Garmin Connect website and mobile app are down at this time,” tweeted Garmin.
“This outage also affects our call centres, 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.”
The outage has affected customers across Garmin’s services – including wearable customers, who have not been able to track data such as their sleeping data and their workouts.
Pilots have also told ZDNet that they were unable to download an up-to-date version of Garmin’s aviation database on their navigational systems – which is a requirement of the US aviation regulator, the FAA.
The Pilot app, which allows these pilots to plan their flights, was also down.
Cause of the outage
The company would not confirm to ZDNet that the outage was caused by a ransomware attack, instead stating that an investigation was ongoing.
However, Garmin employees have said online they believe the incident is caused by the WastedLocker ransomware.
Taiwanese website iThome has reported on an alleged internal memo to Garmin IT staff which claims that company servers have been compromised.
While the reported memo does not explicitly mention ransomware, it does claim that the issue was caused by a virus.
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