Edge 500 not being recognised by garmin express

I am repeatedly getting an error message when trying to get garmin express to recognise a newly-bought edge 500 on a new /freshly configured Mac mini - latest osx - mavericks. Wired connection. Loads activities ok from a forerunner 610, but won't even recognise the edge 500 and gives me a message about problems with the servers and it will all be ok soon. Can garmin please give an update on where they are with fixing this overall issue as it clearly applies to much more than map uploads as suggested in other threads.