Source
r/Garmin•
dplayer00

Garmin’s disastrous communications with its customers bothers me even more than the outage itself

garmin.com

Now that the connect services seem to be coming back up I really want to understand Garmin’s comms strategy throughout this crisis.

Many people have mentioned that they chose to remain silent to mitigate liability, but ultimately the way customers perceive how much a brand cares about them is by the way they communicate with each other.

Garmin deliberately chose to keep everyone in the dark and then released a FAQ that is, quite frankly, ludicrous.

I feel more compelled to switch brands due to the lack of proper communications than to the outage itself.

Posted Jul 27, 2020, 7:59 AM UTC

212
-paul-•

With everything going on in 2020, I don't have any energy left to be outraged about something so minor. It's not like they somehow prevented anyone from running.

9
pewpew_89•

How was anyone prevented from running? All my devices worked well. I only had to copy the routes manually (which needed to be done with earlier devices anyways - edge 520/800 etc.)

1
momo_firefox•

Ok, see you later. Enjoy your new branded devices.

8
[deleted]•

[deleted]

8
LoboSandia•

Imo they don't communicate because they want to give as little info as possible to the hackers. They don't wanna give away that they have found a possible fix. It makes sense from a legal perspective. It's unfortunate for us, but just communicating that the servers are down is enough for me when a hack and ransomware are involved.

6
phigamdel•

100%. The hackers probably did significant recon into the infrastructure of their network and platform. Explaining where they are at in the process or what they’ve done would only tip off hackers, especially if they still had access inside. Give them time to secure their perimeter and internal properties AND bring everything back up before we get a postmortem or more communication

1
swampfish•

Is that what they did? My money is on that they were so incompetent that it just took them 3 days to figure out how to get 10mil in bitcoin.

-1
phigamdel•

Legally speaking, it’s been mentioned they can’t even pay them (sanctions) without some loophole. Again, highly unlikely given what I stated above, and I’m sure we’ll hear sooner or later

Additionally, backups exist. Blow away the bad servers, rebuild, and restore

3
Krandor1•

Yes. That is how wastedlocker works. They infiltrate your network, figure out what defneses you have and then write a CUSTOM version of wastedlocker specific for your environment. Then before the attack they have your servers tell all the systems to disable their antivirus.

This is a sophisticated and planned attack not somebody downloading something from a porn site.

2
outer_space_agent•

The FAQ are also simply wrong.

I lost a 18k run this morning, because my 700€ fitness watch refused to log any distance and crashed while saving. Because it could not reach the server for 3 days. It even did not log a single step during my run.

And yes, I deleted over 100 activities yesterday directly from the watch.

1†
Ekvenkat•

So sorry to hear that! But I don't know why. Because even the small end watch can store 200hr of data, mine had data of 10 months worth,didn't delwte any past activities since it does on its own, but still my watch stored all of my current runs.

Initially, while site was down, I couldn't upload it to connect, but all my steps, activities were stored and was viewed from my watch in the "history".

Were you able to store and view the counts and activities in your watch? Did you connect to GPS while working out?

I didn't have any problem and now all of my four days worth data are now synced safely with connect. Sorry that you experienced this.

2
outer_space_agent•

I also not know why. The first 4-6 activities after the outage were fine. Then one Strength workout failed so save.

I then delete 2 month of old data from the watch.

Then 3 activities worked again and today in the morning it failed once more.

After it synced today, the next activity was fine again. So clearly a problem with the outage.

GPS was synced before I started, I check my position on the map, all was fine.

All my steps, HR data and so on were synced today, but I lost my run and a strength workout. Memory clearly can not be an issue.

0
Ekvenkat•

Since the garmin is back online, with the operation of connect, lets hope that everything is back to normal, lol.

1