Tesla Owners Get Locked Out Of Their Cars When the App Is Down

OK, so maybe not absolutely everything should be controlled by the web. JL

Ivan Mehta reports in The Next Web:

Connected things are wonderful until they fail on you. Numerous Tesla owners allegedly experienced this as they got locked out of the car because the app was apparently down for maintenance. While Tesla’s app helps you unlock the car, you can still use a key card, an option key fob, or the app without needing to connect to the internet. But if you don’t have the key card, and you’re logged out of the app, you have no option but to wait.
Connected things are wonderful until they fail on you. Numerous Tesla owners allegedly experienced this today as they got locked out of the car because the app was apparently down for maintenance.
Several users took Twitter to pour out their agony. Some of them were logged out of the app and weren’t able to use it to unlock their cars.
Downdetector.com, a website that shows the status of various services, had many people reporting an outage for Tesla over the last couple of hours. According to the website, first outages were reported around 4.30AM ET.
While Tesla’s app helps you unlock the car, you can still use a key card, an option key fob, or the app without needing to connect to the internet. But if you don’t have the key card, and you’re logged out of the app, you have no option but to wait.
Some users are now reporting that the app is back up. However, there’s no word from Tesla on what caused the outage. We’ve reached out to the company, and we’ll update the story if we hear back.
Last year, some users allegedly went off the grid when the app was down.While maintenance downtimes are normal, Tesla should’ve accounted for situations like this and ensured their vehicles were accessible to owners, downtime or not.