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 [email protected] 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.
Running coach Angela MacAusland got in touch from the UK to share a photo of her and her client’s Forerunners – both of which have bricked as a result of the ongoing problem.
So far we’ve seen bricked Forerunners of all kinds (265, 965, 255 and 955), Venu 3, Fenix 7, Epix Pro Gen 2, but more devices are possibly affected. If you have a GPS watch from Garmin not on this list and it’s endlessly rebooting, please get in touch: we’d love to hear from you!
Another reader, this time from Belgium, just emailed to share his experiences with the outage:
“Just sharing – my Garmin Forerunner 255 Music was faced with the infinity loop issue currently ongoing. No particular trigger, the one moment I received a Teams message, the other it was black-screen and rebooting. Happened at precisely 12 (midday).”
Our reader reports getting his watch up and running again by doing a factory reset, which effectively erased all his data, and to add insult to injury he’s unable to reconnect to Garmin Connect yet. Fingers crossed a better solution presents itself from Garmin shortly.
I’ve seen a bit of chatter online about a couple of Garmin Fenix 8 models that have also been affected.
We loved the Garmin Fenix 8, calling it “rugged, expensive perfection” and awarding it five stars in our review. However, it did have a bit of a turbulent rollout, as users found that it crashed and went back to that blue triangle reboot screen when submerged in extremely cold water. Not ideal for a watch with a dive mode!
Of course, a software fix soon solved the issue, so we have faith Garmin will be able to roll out a software-based solution in this instance too.
Garmin acknowledges the issue
A red banner has now appeared on the UK support center website, reading the following:
“We are researching reports of devices displaying a blue triangle when starting a GPS activity. A reset by pressing and holding the power button may restore functionality. We will provide more information on a permanent fix when available.”
Meanwhile, I’ve had a few more reports in my inbox: Alan in Australia is reporting his Forerunner 265 has gone down, and another user from Poland is lamenting their crashed Garmin Epix Pro Gen 2. Alas, poor Epix! It seems this is truly a worldwide issue.
It’s worth noting the red banner in the previous post does not yet extend to Garmin Support in the US or Australia. The above, bannerless Garmin Support front page is what you’ll see.
So for those of you in those regions, don’t panic: even though Support hasn’t publicly acknowledged the problems in your region yet, Garmin is aware and presumably a worldwide fix is inbound.
Maybe don’t start recording any GPS activities until this is all over…
Thank you so much for all of your emails. I’m receiving my first reports of the Garmin Forerunner 165 and one of the Garmin Venu 2 also crashing.
A common problem I’m getting in my emails is that the crash is occuring when users try and start a GPS activity. One user, Anne, said all was fine until she pressed start for her run, then the blue flashing triangle appeared. She said: “The screen keeps flickering like it’s trying to reboot but nothing, none of the buttons work”.
Another reader, Madalena, said: “The watch was functioning [normally] until I was ready to start an activity”.
The Garmin subreddit has pinned some advice to the top of the community page stating that “this is caused whenever a user attempts to start a GPS activity”. This doesn’t appear to be the case in every instance, and this isn’t the official word from Garmin, but all the same… why tempt fate, eh?