Hi there! TR’s Senior Fitness and Wearables Ed Matt Evans here. I’m starting this live blog as I’ve been seeing reports of many of the best Garmin watches, including the Garmin Forerunner 265, Garmin Venu 3, and Garmin Epix Pro have been stuck in their respective boot-up screens today.
Users have reached out to support and been told a fix is coming, and we’ve reached out to Garmin for comment. We’ll continue to update this live blog as the situation develops.
In the meantime, reach out via email at matt.evans@futurenet.com and tell us whether you’ve been affected by the problem, and what make and model of Garmin you own. Stay tuned for further developments!
I’m currently testing the Garmin Instinct 3, and that seems to be operating absolutely fine, as is my colleague Homes Editor Catherine Ellis’s Garmin Fenix 7S. I was initially alerted to the problem by a member of her running group, who owns a Forerunner 265.
The Reddit posts below illustrate a couple of examples of the problem that users are facing, including one user’s Fenix 7 Pro. As you can see, the watches are stuck on their respective ‘power on’ screens. For want of a better word, bricked.
This isn’t the first time Garmin has suffered problems this month – on January 8, Garmin’s companion app, Garmin Connect, suffered a major worldwide outage. Functions like Garmin Pay, Garmin Coach, Garmin’s Connect IQ app store, third-party app syncs and more were left unusable for a few hours.
It’s worth noting that this time, Garmin is reporting its major Connect functions as online, and it’s the watches that are experiencing the issue. We’ll let you know if anything changes and Garmin Connect goes down in any capacity too.
