Ex Garmin employee here. Some of their infrastructure supports emergency response. Hard to know how much of what went offline, but if /that/ goes down, people die. On-call was not fun.
supposedly inReach wasn't included in the down time? Wonder if due to better infra or just highly (and rightfully so) prioritized once things went south
Checking https://status.inreach.garmin.com/ (oh the memories) Looks like the meat and potatoes held together! I'd credit segregated infrastructure and redundancy.
Ah, that would probably explain it. I was wondering if the actors wanted to avoid touching services that could impact peoples lives, due to that potentially leading to more motivated investigations. Possibly, but also could just be that it is largely a hardware front-end for Iridium's service.
The outage took out at least some of their aviation services. If they are unable to update routes and IFR approach procedures then lives could indeed be at risk.
Not quite. The onus is on the pilots to never fly with out-of-date navigation information (it's actually illegal), so if they can't get that from Garmin, they'd just have to get it from somewhere else instead. Garmin's data services being unavailable isn't endangering anyone.
They don't. Garmin's cloud services supply map/chart data updates and backend services for their mobile app (which is separate from installed avionics) to support flight planning functionality.