Access to Tesla electric vehicles has been blocked after an outage in the brand’s mobile app, affecting dozens of drivers.
Owners took to social media to report the issues they encountered when trying to use the app, which is necessary to unlock their vehicles, saying that it showed an error message that prevented them from connecting to their cars.
Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk responded to a complaint from a South Korean driver, writing: “Checking.” Later, he said the app would be back online soon.
Tesla vehicle users posted many complaints on social media when the electric carmaker’s app began to fail. Drivers must use the app as a key to unlock, access, and start their vehicles.
According to outage tracking website DownDetector, approximately 500 users experienced and reported a bug in the app around 16:40 ET (21:40 GMT) on Friday. Musk apologized to the vehicles’ owners and said the company would “take measures to ensure this doesn’t happen again.”
DownDetector said just over 60 error reports were recorded five hours later.
In addition to the app, drivers can use a secondary mechanism to get in or out of their cars, but it will be impossible to do so if they don’t carry it, The Car Expert website editor Stuart Masson explained.
“Technology makes things convenient, but relies on a server working 100% of the time. It’s the same as leaving the house without my credit cards, expecting to pay for things with my smartphone. If we are reliant on one mechanism all the time, we can be caught out,” he said.
Also, Professor David Bailey from Birmingham Business School, who has written about the auto industry and experienced Friday’s blackout as a Tesla user, said the automaker was a victim of its own success.
“To some extent, Tesla is a bit of a victim of its own success. It encourages its customers to use the cutting-edge technology it creates and sometimes that will go wrong,” he stated.
Bailey explained that while drivers can use a key to open the company’s cars, their natural instinct is to rely on technology because they have bought one of the highest-tech models on the market.
