Tuesday 28 July 2020

Garmin Forerunner 45 Not Showing or Recording Distance Since Hack July 2020

Garmin systems appear to have been hacked from 23 July 2020 and as of 27th July are slowly starting to come back.

However I've found that since the systems started to come back online my Garmin Forerunner 45 hasn't been showing or recording the distance for activities. I rebooted it but that made no difference. The run or ride still records, it still detects the GPS signal but no distance is shown on the device screen. It shows the pace so something is getting the data for that but the distance stays as zero.
The solution that I've found is to turn the bluetooth on my phone off, then reboot the Forerunner 45 watch and the do the activity so that the watch isn't aware of the phone sync at that point. 

It seems to be the phone that is stopping the distance recording on the watch but not sure how that is being triggered. Until the problem with Garmin is sorted I'm leaving the watch like this so that I can still record distances. 

The Forerunner 45 watch stores quite a bit of data so I'm not in any rush to restart the sync if it stops distances being recorded