Garmin pulls a CrowdStrike, turns smartwatches into fancy bracelets Garmin has experienced its very own CrowdStrike incident after owners of the company's smartwatches complained the faces were showing a blue triangle of death following a seemingly faulty update. IT professionals who lived through the CrowdStrike fiasco in July will remember the blue screens that lit up offices worldwide when …
Even I could pen a better response:
"As you all well know, Garmin is committed to providing the absolutely best experience to our valued customers. We work 24 hours a day to make your lives as productive as possible. This update was made to help you get back to experiencing real life instead of fixating on your stupid baubles."
The only experience I ever had with a Garmin device was a car GPS. I finally gave up when it couldn't navigate from Christchurch to Tekapo. I was prepared to accept its inadequacy in getting from the airport to a CBD hotel as Garmin's maps had obviously not been updated since the earthquake (nearly 10 years previously.) After an hour or two running around the back blocks of Canterbury I ended up using the map in the GPS in the same way I would use a paper map to navigate.
The Garmin was lucky it didn't end up at the bottom of Milford Sound but it is probably still mouldering at the bottom of a heap of the usual assorted obsolete phone chargers, cables and cases commonly to be found in an op (charity) shop.
I was reminded of this yesterday by an email from my health insurer offering discounts on Garmin fitness devices.
Having seen the usual suspects in their designer fitness fashion pounding the pavement (thinking knee joint replacements) I rather think plugging their watches into a computer to delete a file ranks with porcine aviation in feasibility apart from fact the most deficient would be wearing Apple devices (or at a pinch Samsung.)
Only two days ago, it was announced that the late, much lamented Pebble smartwatch will be returning, as Google has open-sourced the code for it, and the original creator plans to restart production.
Since it's been gone for almost 8 years now, one of the biggest questions people are asking is, in the year 2025 with much smart competition like the Apple Watch, why would anyone want a Pebble?
The answer is that it's simple, and "just works".
Having a smarter by an order of magnitude competitor get bricked remotely makes the case for a simple, standalone device much more effectively than any salesman could.
It was a botched CPE file, which is used to make the lock on to the satellites quicker. Basically if you were unlucky to sync your watch to the garmin servers, get the updated CPE file (which happens every couple of days), and then start logging an activity that uses GPS it would get stuck. For most people a soft reboot was enough to get back to a normal watch state and as soon as the CPE file was updated again, all was good.
https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2025/01/garmin-watches-are-crashing-when-trying-to-start-gps.html
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