Garmin services returning after alleged cyber-attack

GPS and fitness-tracker firm Garmin appears to be slowly coming back online following a widespread outage affecting users worldwide.

Users of the company’s services were unable to access their data due to an alleged ransomware attack.

Now customers are starting to report that the service appears to be “partially” working again.

Reports claimed that the company had been asked to pay $10m (£7.79m) to get its systems back online.

Ransomware is a type of malware which lets hackers take control of a company’s systems and encrypt their data, before demanding payment to release it.

Garmin has yet to comment on those claims, or say what was behind the outage.

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Some users reported on Twitter on Monday morning that their health and fitness data was now visible on Garmin’s mobile app.

However, numerous other functions appeared to still be offline.

The problem began on Thursday, and affected Garmin users around the world.

Pilots who use flyGarmin were unable to download up-to-date aviation databases, which aviation regulators such as the FAA require pilots to have, before they can fly.

Customers were also unable to log into Garmin Connect to record and analyse their health and fitness data.

In an email to its users on Sunday, Garmin said it would no longer be responding to user queries about delayed uploads to its servers because “most of the issues will resolve themselves”.

Users were warned that there may be a delay of a “week or longer” for updated health and fitness data to appear on their accounts, due to a backlog.

The company also insisted there was “no indication” that user data had been stolen or removed.