Tesla’s increasingly important mobile app had a network-wide outage last weekend

Tesla’s mobile application is becoming an increasingly important part of the Tesla ownership experience and consequently, it can be a problem when the service is down, which happened last weekend.

To Tesla’s credit, the downtime has been somewhat limited to only rare occasions, but when there’s an issue, it is often for a prolonged period of time.

It happened last year as the app and API was down for almost a full day.

A similar problem happened almost two years ago, but it was with the connection with Tesla’s car data network which stemmed from a problem with the Cisco Jasper Network.

Now, this past weekend, Tesla owners experienced a prolonged mobile app outage starting Saturday afternoon and going into Sunday morning for many owners based on several reports that we received:

Tesla app has been down this afternoon. Tesla is aware and says it is working on it. pic.twitter.com/9MRcGcsaO9

— Fred Lambert (@FredericLambert) April 21, 2018

Tesla acknowledged the issue Saturday and said it was fixed in the evening, but many owners were still experiencing issues the next morning.

I myself wasn’t able to connect my app to my Model S for about 10 hours until mid-morning Sunday.

The ‘Temporary Maintenance’ alert on the image above was apparently not an error. Tesla says that it indeed was doing some planned maintenance, but it took way longer than anticipated – resulting in the app functions being shut down for hours.

As we mentioned, the app is becoming an increasingly important part of the Tesla experience. For Model 3 owners, it’s even becoming their main key.

Tesla naysayers were quick to claim that this app outage would result in thousands of users being locked out of their cars if they didn’t have the key card with them, but Tesla said that this is not the case.

During the outage, Tesla owners couldn’t connect to the automaker’s servers via the app, but the Model 3 phone-based key system works via a Bluetooth LE connection and therefore, they could still use their phones as the key.

The only problem is if Model 3 owners logged out of their account, they couldn’t use the phone-key feature until being logged back in.

During the service outage, Tesla’s support team was telling owners not to log out in order to avoid the issue.

Of course, Tesla also recommends having the keycard with you if you own a Model 3 in order to avoid being stranded in any situation.

For Tesla Model S and Model X owners, it only results in the loss of a few useful features, like monitoring charging, the location of the car, and more.