Tesla owners get locked out of their cars after glitch in smartphone app
Cars charge at a Tesla super charging station in Arlington, Virginia
Several Tesla owners reported a glitch in their smartphone application due to which they got locked out of their cars.
A Tesla owner said that he was experiencing a "500 server error" to connect his Model 3 through the iOS app in Seoul, South Korea.
"Still stuck in Seoul," said Jaehwan Cho.
Another lamented that "THOUSANDS of Teslaowners are locked out of their vehicles becauseTeslaservers went down over two hours ago."
"I'm one of them. They said we'd be helping the environment by owning an electric vehicle, but 'Walking' isn't what I had in mind."
A surge in server problems was detected by the website Downdetector which prevented many owners from connecting to their cars.
It tracks outages by collating status reports from a series of sources, including user-submitted errors on its platform.
The problem seemed widespread with tweets surfacing in countries such as the United States, Canada, Denmark, and Germany.
In response, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said "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," Musk said.
Tesla owners can use an application on their smartphone to unlock their car. It acts as a wireless key fob. They don't need to carry a separate key in their pocket.
(With inputs from agencies)