The Masimo website goes offline–coinciding with their investor meeting. When this Editor posted an article on former Masimo CEO Joseph Kiani’s “beneficial ownership” SEC filing (Schedule G/A, for amended) last Tuesday late evening (29 April), as we generally do, we included a link to the main corporate website. I noted the following day that the home page was down and displayed a ‘performing some maintenance’ message. This is not especially unusual in the evening, as our Readers know, but unusual to continue beyond that.

Checking Wednesday, the website remained down. Yet their consumer-direct sales ‘Shop’ and Investor Relations pages remained up if you linked to them directly, though the medical monitoring smartwatches listed on the shop page were ‘coming soon’. Consulting with Ted Green of Strata-gee, who follows Masimo from their now-sold audio business (see update below) and an excellent source for us, he followed up as it remained offline into Thursday. Press contacts there were unresponsive. An “inside source” provided the only answer obtainable, which was ‘we’re working on it’. Ted called their main line–and received a recorded message that “All circuits are busy, please try your call later”. Calling Customer Service as a final attempt, even they did not know what was going on with the website…and, while phones were working, their internal systems had gone down. Finally, late on Thursday, Ted received an email from a PR representative who pointed him to their changed message on their website stating that the website was down and that they were working to resolve the issue. Ted relates this far more entertainingly in his Search for Information. 

Certainly an unusual and embarrassing situation for a tech-based medical device company, especially one that, at least for investors, is backing up its claims of a new transparency to the max. (See their working Investor Relations page for their postings of their Q1 financial presentation, webcast, and press release). For those of us in the business, an extended ‘offline’ means that we automatically think ‘hack’–another victim of cyberattack or ransomware.

And that is exactly what it turned out to be. Masimo’s SEC Form 8-K filed yesterday led with the following:

On April 27, 2025, Masimo Corporation (the “Company” or “we”) identified unauthorized activity on the Company’s on-premise network. Upon detection, we activated our incident response protocols and implemented containment measures, including proactively isolating impacted systems. We promptly commenced an investigation and are actively working to assess, mitigate, and remediate the incident with the assistance of third-party cybersecurity professionals. The Company has also notified and is coordinating with law enforcement.

As a result of the incident, certain of the Company’s manufacturing facilities have been operating at less than normal levels, and the Company’s ability to process, fulfill, and ship customer orders timely has been temporarily impacted. The Company has been working diligently to bring the affected portions of its network back online, restore normal business operations and mitigate the impact of the incident.

The investigation of the incident remains ongoing, and the full scope, nature, and impact of the incident are not yet known. At this time, the Company believes that the incident appears unrelated to and is not affecting the Company’s cloud-based systems.

Comments below Ted’s Strata-gee article, from an anonymous commenter, said that the FBI had visited the Masimo Irvine headquarters, which lines up with the last sentence of the first paragraph. The filing confirms that the intrusion was detected on Sunday, 27 April–which does not mean that they started then, just that it was found.

It is also evidently broad and deep, not only affecting the website and internal systems used by customer service, but also internal systems used in manufacturing and at all Masimo locations are ‘locked down’ in the words of another commenter. It’s serious when orders can’t ship and most employees are reportedly being told to stay home for the better part of the week, according to commenting insiders.

According to the report in FierceBiotech, CEO Katie Szyman stated that the cyberattack will not dent the company’s financial guidance for the year.

What’s not here: what Masimo is doing to inform customers of the outage, how long it will be, changes in delivery dates of devices, and if performance of any devices has been affected.

Back to the ‘restored’ websites:

A questionable restoration of their website(s). As of Tuesday (6 May, 9 pm EDT), the Masimo website is back live–but it depends on how you enter the URL! There are apparently two websites: a finished corporate and professional product website with a Personal Health section under construction with placeholders, but other live web pages which are accessible, apparently mainly for Canada–or for US under construction or discarded designs. 

• Masimo.com entered as this link (https://www.masimo.com) features a home page with Masimo SET and their professional products such as SafetyNet Alert, a ‘cloud-based telehealth platform’. It is a tidy, respectable, and up-to-date corporate website featuring the full line of Masimo’s many professional monitoring products. Links in header and footer are standard, including corporate information and links to investor relations. Where it is not complete: clicking on Personal Health in the footer links will take you to a URL with a path that indicates a US ‘Shop’ page but is titled Support–Masimo Customer Service. Links for four individual product areas, including ‘Health at Home & Opioid Safety’, lead only to customer support information and a repeated, annoying cookies permission popup. This website appears finished except for Personal Health.
• But if you enter only Masimo.com, the URL immediately redirects to a Canadian shop domain page and path that features how their pulse oximetry device and app (SafetyNet Alert) can monitor prescribed opioid usage for difficulties in breathing (respiratory depression) which can prove, from their tragic case study example, fatal. The new Halo app can be downloaded on the Apple App Store or Google Play. Want to find out more about it? It goes to a page that no longer exists. 
• Clicking on the Personal Health tab at the top, it links to another Canadian ‘Shop’ domain page highlighting that their noninvasive monitoring used by hospitals is now available for home use, but the only item for sale is the Denon PerL Pro earbuds with a Canadian dollar price. No mention of SafetyNet Alert. 
• To find their personal health devices, one has to go to the links on the footer under Customer Service>>Track Order’. This takes you to the US ‘Shop’ path page. There three ‘Health at Home’ devices are featured without descriptions. Clicking on the ‘Shop All’ button takes you to a US path page featuring the MightySat home pulse oximeter, the W1 smartwatch, and the RadiusT temperature tracker. Unfortunately, clicking on the ‘Find A Retailer’ button on each individual page leads you to a 404 page–‘That Page No Longer Exists’. 
• These pages are in layout and style unlike the corporate website. Formats vary all over the lot.
• On other pages linked in the footer, it appears there are some new pages, along with old web pages restored without updating.
• Extremely annoyingly, on every page or return to a page, a permission popup for accepting cookies blocks the page until you accept or decline.

Where’s the project/marketing manager supervising this? Again, it’s embarrassing for a digital health technology company, even post-cyberattack, to have this level of visible website disorganization, coupled with days offline and reports of complete disruption. The best approach would be a minimal website until a finished website, working on all URLs and paths, is completed. Other than the main corporate website, the ‘Canadian’ and other pages should be offline until discarded or finalized.

Update–Sound United sold. Also announced yesterday (6 May) was the $350 million cash sale of Sound United to HARMAN International, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. The definitive agreement release did not mention staff transitions. HARMAN’s audio products include Harman Kardon, JBL, and AKG. The sale is scheduled to close by the end of 2025. The sale was mentioned several times during the Q1 earnings call but HARMAN was not mentioned. The sale is not included in Masimo’s 2025 forward outlook, versus the considerable impact of tariffs on their imports from China and Malaysia.

Sound United’s sale for a third of its purchase price is the finale of a very big, very bad billion-dollar bet made by Joe Kiani and his management team in 2022. The ‘vision’, such that it was, was that the audio brands would leverage consumer health wearables into retailers such as Best Buy. It didn’t. The buy immediately tanked the value of the company by an estimated $5 billion in one day, and kicked off a long trail of investor unrest that resulted in a takeover by Politan Capital and the ouster of Kiani and his board members last year. The rest, as they say, is history. (And Joe Kiani is likely enjoying a good bottle of vintage Pol Roger and shivering with schadenfreude.) Wall Street Journal