Tesla owners locked out of their cars for several hours as app fails

Last night Tesla owners around the world were complaining about their app was throwing 500 HTTP server errors and was not updating the status of their vehicle.

Some owners were also complaining of being unable to start their vehicle, though the reason for this is unclear, as the app should still normally function independently of the Tesla network.

The outage appears to have lasted for 5 hours and is now resolved.

According to Elon Musk, this was due to a configuration error which “increased the verbosity of the network traffic”.

Should be coming back online now. Looks like we may have accidentally increased verbosity of network traffic.

Apologies, we will take measures to ensure this doesn’t happen again.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 20, 2021

Tesla has recently updated their app to include the ability to stream video from your car’s camera to your phone, and it may be that this issue is related to that change.

While users can unlock their car by phone, Tesla still urges users to keep their key card with them as a backup.