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.