A Texas woman is suing Tesla and a driver for at least $1m (£759,000) in damages after one of the electric vehicles crashed into her family home, killing her mother

Jennifer Barbour filed her lawsuit in a local court on Tuesday, just days after her 76-year-old mother Martha Avila died from injuries she sustained after a Tesla Model 3 sped into their shared home.

The Tesla driver told police that he was using the car’s autonomous or “full self-driving” technology at the time of the crash.

In the lawsuit Barbour accuses Elon Musk’s electric vehicle company of defective design and negligence by promoting technology that is unsafe, while Musk on social media denied the technology was to blame.

Tesla was approached for comment.

Musk took to X, the social media platform he owns, to refute the idea that Tesla’s self-driving technology was to blame for the crash because it happened at a high speed.

“This makes no sense,” Musk wrote on Monday.

Tesla’s vice president of AI software Ashok Elluswamy followed up on Musk’s comment with more apparent detail on the accident.

Elluswamy wrote that the driver was going at 73mph (117 km/h) and had overridden the car’s self-driving mode “by pressing the accelerator all the way to 100%.”

He also claimed that the driver “had the accelerator pushed even after the crash”.

Barbour’s complaint, filed with her husband Justin Barbour, puts forward a different explanation.

It argues that the driver was operating his Tesla on “in a reasonably foreseeable manner” with full self-driving engaged when the car’s technology “failed to detect the end of the street”, went into “sudden unintended acceleration” and crashed into the Barbour residence.

In addition to the death of her mother, Barbour claims her husband also suffered severe and grievous injuries as a result of the crash.

Monetary damages being sought include those for anguish, injury and medical expenses, as well as “exemplary” damages because Tesla’s actions have been “grossly negligent.”

The crash remains under investigation by police in Texas and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the US government’s auto safety regulator.

Tesla’s self-driving technology has come under increased criticism and scrutiny.

Last week, Democratic Senators Edward Markey and Richard Blumenthal sent a letter, external to the NHTSA demanding that the agency investigate Tesla’s full self-driving technology for its safety risks.

Reports of a possible service disruption affecting Dish Network surfaced Wednesday, with some viewers reporting issues across the satellite TV provider’s channels, even as official confirmation of a widespread outage remained limited.

What Users Are Reporting

StatusGator has detected an outage at Dish Network. Picture breaking up and freezing on all channels. There have been 36 user-submitted reports of outages in the past 24 hours. Based on our analysis, Dish Network might be experiencing or have recently experienced an outage even though there is no official acknowledgment of the issue.

The specific problems reported by users have centered primarily on signal quality issues rather than a complete blackout. Incident description: Satellite TV signal loss affecting service availability. The disruption was first detected at 5:57 p.m. on Wednesday, June 24.

Where Reports Are Concentrated

The most recent Dish Network outage reports came from the following cities: Crawfordville, Ashburn, Connersville, Phenix City, Chillicothe, Baytown, French Lick, Cedar Rapids, Charlotte, Tompkinsville, Mason, Beaverton, Abilene, Dallas, and Twin Falls — suggesting the reported issues, if connected, span a wide geographic footprint across multiple states rather than being confined to a single regional outage.

No Official Acknowledgment From the Company

Despite the volume of user reports, Dish Network has not issued any public statement confirming a widespread service disruption. According to monitoring data, the incident has never been officially acknowledged by the company, a pattern consistent with how Dish has historically responded to user-reported outage spikes that fall short of a confirmed, company-wide technical failure.

A History of Periodic, Brief Disruptions

Wednesday’s reports add to a documented pattern of intermittent service issues that Dish Network has experienced throughout 2026. Earlier outage data shows a signal loss incident affecting local channels detected on June 7, lasting about 20 minutes, as well as a separate incident on June 3 tied to local channels being unavailable due to maintenance, lasting roughly 29 minutes, and another brief disruption on June 2 involving local channels not working or showing a scrambled picture.

A Notably Quieter Track Record by Other Measures

Not every outage-tracking service has identified the same pattern of frequent disruptions, however, illustrating the inherent variability in how different monitoring tools detect and classify service issues. One service reported that Dish Network appears to be working normally, with report volume within the typical range for the time of day, and noted that the last reported incident before that assessment was roughly 680 days earlier. A separate tracker similarly noted zero confirmed outages over the prior 12 months, based on its own monitoring methodology, despite scattered individual user complaints about slow performance or channels not working.

What to Do During a Suspected Outage

For customers experiencing service problems, Dish has outlined a standard set of troubleshooting and verification steps. Customers can call the Dish customer support phone number, 1-800-333-3474, which is staffed 24/7, or check third-party outage tracker Downdetector, which surveys customers for issues they’ve faced within the last 24 hours and provides an outage map for a visual check of issues in a specific area. Dish has also directed customers to its DISH Answers account on social media during select hours for real-time updates on potential service outages in their area.

If a confirmed area-wide outage is identified, the company says the only thing customers can do is wait, though Dish maintains that it prioritizes these repairs to restore channels as quickly as possible. For issues isolated to an individual household rather than a broader area, the company recommends checking the connection of the satellite receiver, since equipment-level glitches — such as a failed software update or an overheating receiver — can also cause channel disruptions distinct from a true network-wide outage.

Understanding How Dish Signals Travel

Dish has explained that service disruptions can originate at any of three points along the signal’s path to a customer’s home. Live TV signals from Dish travel a long path to reach a home, passing through three major touchpoints that can cause an outage: the television stations that send their content to Dish satellites via radio waves, the Dish satellites that bounce the radio signal down to a customer’s satellite dish, and the home satellite setup itself, which converts the signals for display on the television. According to the company, losing just a channel or two typically points to an issue at the originating TV station, while a broader loss across most or all channels indicates a genuine Dish Network-side outage.

With user-submitted reports continuing to be monitored by third-party outage trackers and no official statement yet issued by Dish Network confirming the scope or cause of Wednesday’s reported issues, customers experiencing picture freezing, signal loss, or other service disruptions are encouraged to check Downdetector or similar tracking services for updates specific to their region, or to contact Dish customer support directly for individualized troubleshooting. Given the company’s history of brief, localized disruptions resolving within roughly 20 to 30 minutes, affected customers may see normal service restored relatively quickly, though the company has not provided a specific timeline for resolution as of the most recent reports.

Families are expected to get cheaper access to theme parks, zoos and museums as well as kids’ meals as a temporary VAT cut comes in to force on Thursday for the school summer holidays.

Ticket prices at various attractions are among the activities where VAT will be reduced from 20% to 5% in what the goverment said would help with the cost of living.

The cut begins on 25 June, in time for schools breaking up in Scotland at the end of this month, followed by Northern Ireland, England and Wales in July, until 1 September.

But families, charities and firms said the measure will do little to help squeezed budgets, with some doubting the tax saving would be passed on to customers.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves said the summer holidays could be quite expensive, and the purpose of the temporary cut to VAT on family-related activities was to “help people make those precious memories during the summer holidays, but not having to fork out too much for it”.

Alan, 42, from Brighton goes to theme parks with him family regularly but he does not expect much from the VAT cut.

“These kind of attractions are quite expensive in the first place,” he said, adding that the savings, if passed on, would be “negligible” and only benefit those who go to theme parks as a one-off.

He said the best option for his family was having a theme park pass, which they use to go to Legoland, Chessington World of Adventure and Sea Life centres.

Helen Miller, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies think tank, previously said the measures would lead to some savings, but estimated they would equate to an “average saving of around £10 per UK household”.

Alan says that more useful measures would be if energy and fuel costs were addressed.

“How the government can say this is going to result in any household saving is a mystery,” he said.

Asked whether the savings would be meaningful, Reeves told the BBC the government was focused on helping families.

“Especially over the summer, things can be a bit more expensive. So we are targeting this directly at families,” she said, adding there would also be unlimited free bus travel for children in England in August.

The chancellor pointed to other measures the government has introduced including freezing prescription charges, freezing rail fares and providing energy bill relief as also helping households with cost of living pressures.

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