Some Garmin services are still offline several days after a giant cyber attack shut them down, the company said

• Fitness tracker maker Garmin confirmed that it was recently the victim of a cyber attack, coming after reports said the company was hit with a ransomware attack.
• The attack encrypted some of Garmin's systems and was responsible for the multi-day outage that began near the end of last week.
• The news came on Monday as Garmin's services slowly began coming back online.
• Garmin expects service to return to normal in the coming days.

Fitness tracker maker Garmin confirmed on Monday that a cyber attack was behind the outage that's been impacting its services over the past several days. The news came as the company's affected services slowly began coming back online.

The attack occurred on July 23 and encrypted some of the company's systems. Garmin says it expects to return to normal operations over the next few days.

Reports from ZDNet, TechCrunch, and the BBC have said the outage was the result of a ransomware attack, but this is the first time Garmin has mentioned a cyber attack in connection with the outage.

The company's system status dashboard shows that its Garmin Connect service, which customers use to manage their devices and track health data, has regained some functionality but is still limited. Leaderboard statistics in the app's challenges section may be delayed, for example, and the app's daily summary feature is delayed. Workouts are also not syncing to devices at this time.

Garmin says on its website that it's unable to receive any calls, emails, or online chats, noting also that some features and service remain unavailable to customers. In addition to impacting its line of consumer fitness trackers, the outage is also said to have affected the company's aviation products.

The company hasn't revealed much about the outage, but did say there's no indication that consumer data including activity, payment, or any other personal information was compromised. Customers also shouldn't have to worry about losing any health and wellness data gathered by Garmin devices. Such data is stored on the device and should appear in the app once it starts syncing again, the company says.

Some Garmin users have said on Twitter that they've begun noticing some services resuming. Others, however, have expressed frustration about the situation or shared their workarounds.

On July 23, ZDNet reported that Garmin had shut down its services to grapple with the aftermath of a ransomware attack. A new type of ransomware called WastedLocker is believed to have been behind the attack, according to the reports.

Cybersecurity software company Malwarebytes reports that WastedLocker is commonly used by a malware exploitation gang called Evil Corp, and that the ransomware is usually targeted at specific organizations.