I have a lot of respect for the Tesla Supercharger network. Those sleek white and red towers have done more to democratize electric cars in America than any other charging company. They make fast charging easy, reliable and ubiquitous.
Tesla also keeps building stations faster than the rest of the industry. And now that other automakers are joining the North American Charging Standard (NACS) network, I’ve found myself relying on Superchargers even more.
But last week, the Tesla app bailed on me. And I wasn’t alone.
Last Tuesday, I was planning to film a 10-80% charging test with the 2026 Kia EV9, which now ships with the NACS port right from the factory. I planned to drive the EV9 an hour north from South Brooklyn and meet our video director, Michael Roselli, midway at a Tesla Supercharger in Harrison, New York.
Photo by: Suvrat Kothari
The drive allowed me to run the EV9’s battery down to 10% and then we would run our usual charging test, evaluating authentication, speed and time. There was nothing new to say about the Superchargers themselves. These are, after all, the gold standard of reliability and they’re everywhere. They’ve worked for me every single time in the past, including for several non-Tesla EVs. So a stop in say a 2026 Nissan Leaf or the 2026 Hyundai Ioniq 9 pretty much looks the same: Pull up to the station, select the stall number on the Tesla app and hit the start button. If there’s no native NACS port, you just add the adapter. It’s easy, or supposed to be—but not this time.
My problems with the Tesla app actually started the day before the charging test. That was the same day when half the internet called in sick, because Amazon Web Services (AWS) was having a bad day. A bug in the tech giant’s cloud infrastructure basically took swathes of the internet down.
It affected everything from airlines and streaming platforms to payment apps and food delivery services. A stark reminder of how our lives are alarmingly dependent on AWS, which powers a staggering portion of what we see, how we work and even how we get around.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk ridiculed AWS and chanced on how reliable his social media platform X was, unaffected by the massive outage. His other big app, however, wasn’t doing so great.
On my Android phone, the Tesla app struggled to load, let alone help me initialize a charging session. The logo appeared and the loading ring spun endlessly, leading to a blank screen. This happened at least a dozen times. But given Tesla’s strong track record, I assumed the problem was on my end.
I went to Tesla Support and followed the troubleshooting instructions. I signed out and back in. I uninstalled and reinstalled the app. I switched my phone off and on again. I even cleared the cache on all my apps to boost phone performance. None of that worked.
It’s hard to say whether the AWS outage directly caused Tesla’s app meltdown. Tesla doesn’t respond to media requests for comments. Hyundai and Kia do, but they did not respond to our request for comment at the time of writing.
But the automaker does hire engineers with AWS cloud infrastructure expertise, according to its careers webpage, and since AWS is basically the whole internet at this point, it’s hard to imagine these problems weren’t correlated. Especially since I was also not alone in this. Tesla drivers took to Reddit and Facebook to share similar experiences. Some owners said they couldn’t initiate charging because the Tesla logo kept spinning in the app, without it ever loading.
One owner explained that the app showed error codes and spent three hours trying to contact Tesla Support. Others said they had to use non-Tesla charging stations to juice up their EVs.
The night before my charging test and about 18 hours after the AWS outage took websites down, the Tesla app finally started working again. I breathed a sigh of relief as I could do my charging test the following day.
Thinking everything was normal again, I backed the EV9 into the Supercharger stall in Harrison the next day. The app loaded fine this time, but immediately flashed a charging error. “Plug the cable back into the post and try again,” the alert on the app read. “If error persists, select another post,” it said.
At first, it seemed like someone before me hadn’t latched the cable correctly back into the stall (It was perfectly latched), which meant I couldn’t begin charging from the app. I removed the cable and plugged it back into the stall firmly to see if the warning on the app went away. It didn’t.
We didn’t have all day, so I moved to another stall. I hit start in the app, but nothing happened. I canceled the session, tried again and still nothing. Finally, after turning the car off and back on (The solution to everything!), it began charging properly.
2026 Kia EV9 at Tesla Supercharger
Photo by: InsideEVs
Weirdly, after I hit stop on the app at 80% charge, it continued for several minutes still, which was again… odd. And not consistent with our past Tesla charging experiences. I pressed the physical button on the cable and charging finally stopped.
My flawless streak with Tesla Superchargers ended that day. I couldn’t help but feel relieved that I hadn’t been road-tripping during the AWS outage. Because if I had, those app glitches and connection issues could’ve left me stranded. Thankfully, New York State’s robust charging network means I knew backup options weren’t all that far away. (We also can’t rule out the possibility that they would be affected by an AWS outage too, but that wasn’t our experience that day.)
This still exposes vulnerabilities within the Supercharger network, especially as the auto industry pins its hopes on that helping to drive EV adoption. One sneeze on the backend means drivers can be left waiting, rebooting their cars and phones and scrambling to get things working. That’s hardly ideal when more non-Tesla EVs are joining the Supercharger ecosystem.
Sure, plug-and-charge can soften some of those edges, but that convenience still mostly belongs to Tesla owners. Other automakers, notably Hyundai, Kia, Toyota and Subaru, are also starting to offer that for their NACS-equipped models. Still, between the adapter hell and everything that’s required to get charging to work [authentication, payments, etc.,] there’s too much friction between EVs and charging than owners asked for.
Moreover, it’s one more example of the downsides to so much of the internet running on AWS. The outage impacted credit card points-of-sale for gas stations, too, but those should at least take cash. In the hyper-connected, digital world of EV charging, this is a challenge that must be addressed.
As EVs go mainstream, reliability can’t just mean I can charge only when the app works. Drivers shouldn’t have to think twice about whether a charger—or the cloud that powers it—will be up when they need it. After all, you never have to think about these things when pumping gas. It’s time the EV industry reached the same level.
Got a tip? Email the author: suvrat.kothari@insideevs.com
