Tesla users lose access to their cars due to app outages, Musk blames network traffic congestion

Tesla owners experienced app outages on Friday, causing many users to lose access to their cars. According to a report by Electreck, Tesla’s mobile app which the drivers can use to unlock, start, and control their cars was unable to connect to the servers. This resulted in many users getting locked out of their EVs. The outages were widespread with people from the USA, Canada, Europe, and Asia reporting issues.

While the problem persisted for the better part of Friday, everything is back on track. Replying to a user complaint on Twitter, Tesla CEO Elon Musk attributed the problem to “increased verbosity of network traffic”. Programs often maintain data logs to help with error detection. In some cases, companies can choose to enable “verbose mode” to make the data logs carry much more information to pinpoint the exact problem. However, enabling this mode, aka increasing the verbosity, results in a substantial increase in the size of logs, making them much more bandwidth-intensive.

If Musk’s tweet is correct, some Tesla services were sending verbose data logs, resulting in network congestion that stopped users from connecting to the servers. Musk also said that the company is taking measures to prevent this from happening in the future.

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