Garmin Outage - Now Fixed

On Tuesday 28th Jan we received several calls and emails from customers whose Garmin watches and bike computers were stuck on the boot up screen and showing the blue triangle logo.

Any activity or navigation app that you tried to open up that relied on location would result in the devices crashing or continuously stuck in a rebooting cycle.

In summary, any watch or bike computer that contains the latest GPS chipset. This includes the following:

1. Garmin Forerunner 255/955/265/965/165
2. Garmin ePix and ePix Pro Gen 2 series
3. Garmin fenix 7 and fenix 7 PRO series
4. Garmin fenix 8 and E series
5. Garmin Enduro 2 and 3 series
6. Garmin Instinct 3 Series
7. Garmin Approach S70 series
8. Garmin Tactix 7 seies
9. Garmin vivoactive 4 and 5 series
10. Garmin Venu 3 series
11. Garmin Edge 540/840/1040/1050 series

In technical terms, a modern GPS device use pre-cached ephemeris data to fix onto GPS satellites more quickly. The pre-cached data is in the form of a EPO or CPE file that is normally downloaded onto your device every couple of days. In simple terms, the device knows exactly where the GPS satellites are as they orbit the earth so is able to give you a near instanteous GPS signal.

Before EPO files, it could take 30 seconds to 2 minutes to get a GPS signal so these new GPS chipsets are brilliant until...the EPO file downloaded onto the device is corrupt. This is what happened on Tuesday.

This isn't the first time this has occurred - the last time was approximately 4 years ago and again back in 2010-2011. Garmin, no doubt, have another set of lessons learned, after action reviews and mitigation steps to implement in the coming months to ensure that their GPS device ecosystem does not go into meltdown every time something unexpected happens.

Garmin released a new version of the EPO file on Wednesday and for most owners, their devices should have updated without any special intervention. If, however, you are still experiencing difficulties, Garmin have published the following support page on their website.

https://support.garmin.com/en-IE/?faq=IWfNuaG0jn6d6oQ4HCVz29