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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Is this affecting anything important, like aircraft, boat, or car navigation, or just the fitness trackers?

Oh man. I was mildly amused that people couldn’t access their fitness history. I just tried to access flygarmin.com to update my aircraft’s aviation databases, and this shit just got real.

My airplane is grounded for IFR flights — I always fly IFR. I pay Garmin $865/year for subscription. There are thousands of aircraft in the same predicament.

Does Garmin offer an SLA on these services? I feel like if I paid that much annually for a service they better well give me an SLA.

I don’t know. I’ve never even thought about it. Until now.

flygarmin.com is back online.

The fact that GARMIN is incapable of offering e.g. aviation updates via an alternative route such as downloading from a website and then manually uploading to a device (needs only to be open in emergencies) is simply ridiculous. This obviously also goes for any other of their services, but obviously with aviation (and potentially also maritime) data there is a much higher and substantial need to offer such services, and I also agree: The fact that no SLA for anything seems to be (offically) in place along with the fact that not a single statement regarding expected downtime is made... I stop there!

Quick question: Does anyone know who runs/hosts/maintains/secures GARMIN servers? Are they owned and operated by the company itself or is all or parts of it outsourced?

Aviation database updating has apparently been hit by this [1], and pilots are mandated by the FAA to keep them up-to-date. Car navigation won't be significantly affected as long as the roads haven't changed drastically since the maps were last updated - all the plotting and directions are done on the device itself.

1. https://www.zdnet.com/article/garmin-services-and-production...

Their call centres are affected so I suspect any sort of assistance with the above services is affected. Fitness trackers still work, you just can't sync with the app.

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