Garmin watches are mysteriously crashing when their owners try and use them to exercise.
Owners of a variety of different Garmin products report the watches stop working when attempting to start an activity that would track their location using GPS.
Instead, the watches just show the blue triangle that is displayed when the watches are turned on or restarted.
“We are researching reports of devices displaying a blue triangle when starting a GPS activity,” a message on the Garmin site reads.
“Holding the power button until the unit powers off, then turning it back on may restore functionality temporarily. We will provide more information on a permanent fix when available.”
Sports technology expert DC Rainmaker, who was among the first to report the problems, speculated that the issue related to the “satellite pre-cache file” that is stored on the watches. That is a quick map to where satellites are in the sky, allowing the watches to acquire their location much more quickly.
The file is updated every few days to ensure that it is still correct, and those updates are automatically passed to the watch. As such, watches may have received the broken update and are then unable to start the activities that rely on it.
That same file has caused issues in the past. Previously, errors in those files meant that watches from a variety of different manufacturers were showing incorrect locations, rather than crashing.
