Outages of the Tesla app locked some owners out of their cars

Tesla’s app server crashed a few hours ago, leading to a worldwide app crash that left owners unable to connect to their cars. For those who have been most dependent on their phones instead of the key cards, it means being banned from their vehicles. Electrek first reported the problem after receiving complaints from Tesla owners on Friday night, and for a while it seemed as if the problem only affected drivers in North America. But then an owner from Seoul, South Korea tweeted to Elon Musk about getting a server error on their app, to which the Tesla boss replied that he was “checking out”.

Other tweets show owners calling for roadside assistance and delay their plans for the night. The power outage came shortly after the automaker rolled out an update to the application, which Electrek said includes a feature that Tesla had trouble implementing. It is unclear whether it was related to the power outage, since Musk has not yet followed up his first response. In any case, it seems that the power outage is starting to resolve. Down Detector received a total of 543 messages a few hours ago, but now they are down to less than a hundred.

Being banned from vehicles can be a persistent problem as car manufacturers switch to cloud services and increase their reliance on smartphone apps. As this situation showed, it is still a good idea to bring a key card / key observer for security.