Ownership Today? Tesla Drivers Locked Out of Cars Due To App Mishap

In the digital age ownership is not quite as definitive as it once was. 

With software and apps actually owned and operated by others who control access to almost everything, including assets people thought they had purchased, what consumers bought is not necessarily what they own. JL 

The Guardian reports:

Hundreds of Tesla drivers were locked out of their cars at the start of the weekend after the manufacturer’s mobile app suffered an outage. In September 2020, the company had experienced a complete outage of both its customer-facing servers and internal system for several hours. Tesla drivers are not entirely reliant on the app. “There will be a secondary mechanism to get in or out of the car beyond the app, the difficulty will come for drivers if they are not carrying it.”

Hundreds of Tesla drivers were locked out of their cars at the start of the weekend after the manufacturer’s mobile app suffered an outage – and dozens voiced their complaints on social media.

Elon Musk, Tesla’s chief executive, said on Friday that the company’s mobile application was coming back online after the app server outage. Musk was responding to a Tesla owner’s tweet, who said that he was experiencing a “500 server error” to connect his Model 3 through the iOS app in Seoul, South Korea.

“Should be coming back online now. Looks like we may have accidentally increased verbosity of network traffic,” Musk said.

 

About 500 users reported they faced an error at about 4.40pm ET (9.40pm GMT), according to outage monitoring website Downdetector, which tracks outages by collating status reports from a series of sources, including user-submitted errors on its platform. There were just over 60 reports by about 9.20pm ET.

“Apologies, we will take measures to ensure this doesn’t happen again,” Musk said on Twitter.

According to Electek, Tesla’s systems rarely have outages, though the website said that, in September 2020, the company had experienced a complete outage of both its customer-facing servers and internal system for several hours.

Stuart Masson, editor of the Car Expert website, told the BBC that Tesla drivers were not entirely reliant on the app. “There will be a secondary mechanism to get in or out of the car beyond the app, the difficulty will come for drivers if they are not carrying it,” he said.