What you can learn from Garmin’s recent outage

On July 23 Garmin services stopped unexpectedly.

Many think of Garmin as a fitness watch manufacturer, but the company has many more services to offer — most notably in marine and aviation range. As Garmin went black the services we shut down as well; many pilots and captains were unable to download and update maps, with little to no information from Garmin itself.

I’m not going to speculate about the reasons of blackout (which, as some sources say was caused by Wasted Locker ransomware attack), and huge recovery time (four days to put services online in a limited mode, and still limited as for the time of writing — total six days after blackout). I want to talk about the PR strategy and brand communication.

Garmin’s official twitter account tweeted on July 23d (admitting that they do have an outage), and then on July 25th apologising for the “inconvenience”, and on July 27th saying that “all the services are returning to operation”. For 20b worth public company it is a communication disaster. What can your company do to avoid it?

Have a plan

Your disaster recovery plan (like, restoring data from backups or switching to another datacenter) should also include PR and communication plan. You should know when to update and what to tell, and finally — who is…