There is a button on the Garmin CIRQA that says End. Do not press it, unless you enjoy losing the workout you just finished.
That is the state of things on Garmin's own support forums, where owners of the screenless $200 band have been reporting that activities disappear immediately after they finish them. The band vibrates to acknowledge the instruction. The workout never shows up in Garmin Connect.
Garmin has acknowledged the reports, offered a workaround, and has not yet fixed it.
What Actually Happens
The failure needs a specific sequence, and it is an easy sequence to fall into.
You start a workout using the button on the CIRQA itself. When you are done, you open the Garmin Connect app, which shows an "Activity in Progress" message offering two choices: Resume and End.
You tap End. The band vibrates, confirming it received the command. The prompt closes. And the activity is gone, with no entry in Connect.
The reverse is also reported. One forum member put the rule as plainly as it can be put: "If you start an activity with the button, you have to end it with the button." Start and finish the session on the band, and the workout is saved normally. Start on the band, finish in the app, and you lose it.
One owner described the moment of realization: "I've lost 8+ workouts now and I thought it was a syncing issue. It's in fact by design??"
That last word is his, not Garmin's, and it is worth being precise about. Garmin has not called this a bug in public, and it has not explained why the activity is discarded. It has also not said which versions of the CIRQA firmware or the Connect app are affected.
Garmin's Own Workaround
A Garmin representative posting in the thread confirmed the behavior and offered this route instead:
If an activity is started from the CIRQA, Garmin Connect may first display an "Activity in Progress" message with Resume and End options. Selecting Resume opens the activity recording screen, where the activity can then be stopped and saved. Once the activity is saved and a sync has completed, it should appear in Garmin Connect.
So the workaround is to press the button that sounds wrong. Tap Resume on a workout you have already finished, let it open the recording screen, then stop and save from there. The same Garmin representative later acknowledged the pattern explicitly:
Several users in this thread have reported losing activity data after selecting End from the initial prompt. We've shared the feedback mentioned in this thread internally for further review, and are reaching out to some users to gather additional information.
No timeline for a fix has been given.
Why Owners Are Angry Rather Than Just Annoyed
Losing a workout is a bad outcome for any fitness tracker. What has rankled people in the thread is the logic of the prompt itself, and it is hard to argue with.
You are shown a dialog with exactly two options. One says Resume, the other says End. The workout is over. Tapping End is the correct reading of the interface, and it deletes your data.
One owner laid out the comparison that makes the case: everywhere else in Garmin Connect, ending an activity takes you to a screen where you choose to save, edit or discard. That is also how Garmin's own CIRQA manual documents the flow, where stopping an activity presents Discard, Resume and Save as explicit choices. In this one prompt, the same word means something different, and the destructive option is the one that looks like the obvious next step.
The same owner's summary of the stakes is the line that should worry Garmin most: "A $200 faceless smart band to track activity should try to preserve whatever data it has and make data removal an explicit action. Tracking data is literally its only job."
The CIRQA has no screen, no buttons beyond the one, and no way to review a workout on the device. If the record vanishes before it reaches your phone, it is simply gone. There is no second copy to recover and nothing on your wrist to check.
It Is Probably Not the 3.20 Firmware
One obvious suspect can be set aside. The CIRQA recently received a major 3.20 firmware update, which makes it a natural thing to blame.
Owners were reporting disappearing activities before that release went out, so there is no evidence that 3.20 introduced the problem. Whether 3.20 fixes it, makes it worse, or leaves it alone is not something Garmin has said.
What to Do Until It Is Fixed
Three rules that will keep your data safe:
- Start and end on the band, or start and end in the app. Mixing the two is what triggers the loss. The forum's simple version is that the button starts a workout, so the button should finish it
- If you do see the "Activity in Progress" prompt, tap Resume. Then stop and save from the recording screen, and let the sync complete before doing anything else. It looks backwards because it is
- Update both. Garmin's public advice is to make sure the CIRQA and the Garmin Connect app are fully current, which is worth doing even though it is not a confirmed fix
If you have already lost workouts, there is nothing to recover. The activity was never written to Connect, so it is not sitting in a broken sync queue waiting to appear.
Bottom Line
Garmin's CIRQA has a prompt where the option labeled End discards your workout and the option labeled Resume is the one that saves it. Garmin has confirmed the pattern, shared a workaround, and said it is reviewing the feedback and contacting affected owners. It has not called it a bug, explained the cause, named the affected versions, or given a date.
Until that changes, the safe habit is to finish your workouts on the band. It is the only part of the system that behaves the way it reads. It is also not the band's first software problem; we covered its Bluetooth broadcast bug earlier this year.
Sources: Garmin's CIRQA Smart Band support forum thread "Activities doesn't sync to Connect" including Garmin representative replies and owner reports, Garmin's published CIRQA Smart Band owner's manual for the documented start, stop, save and discard flows, and reporting from Gadgets and Wearables, TechRadar and Android Authority on the disappearing workout reports and the confirmed workaround.