Hundreds of Tesla drivers were locked out of their cars earlier in the weekend after the manufacturer’s mobile app suffered an outage – and dozens took to social media to voice their grievances.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk said Friday that the company’s mobile application is coming back online after the app server went down. Musk responded to a Tesla owner’s tweet who said he was getting a “500 server error” trying to connect his Model 3 through the iOS app in Seoul, South Korea.
Should be back online now. Looks like we accidentally increased network traffic verbosity.
Sorry, we will take action to ensure this doesn’t happen again.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 20, 2021
“Should be back online now. It looks like we accidentally increased the verbosity of the network traffic,” Musk said.
The outage was first reported by electric vehicle specialist website Electrek, which first received reports from Tesla owners in the US and Canada, then Europe and Asia.
About 500 users reported facing an error around 4:40 p.m. ET (9:40 p.m. GMT), according to outage monitoring website Downdetector, which tracks outages by compiling status reports from a range of sources, including users Bugs submitted to their platform. As of about 9:20 p.m. ET, there were just over 60 reports.
“Sorry, we will take action to ensure this doesn’t happen again,” Musk said on Twitter.
According to Electek, Tesla’s systems rarely experience outages, although the website said the company experienced a multi-hour complete outage of both its customer-facing servers and internal system in September 2020.
Stuart Masson, editor of website Car Expert, told the BBC that Tesla drivers are not entirely dependent on the app. “There will be a secondary mechanism to get in or out of the car beyond the app, the difficulty will arise for drivers if they don’t wear it,” he said.
