Try a different stall first — most “broken station” arrivals are actually one dead stall at a working site. If the whole site is down, your fallback is whatever charger you can reach with the range you have left, which is why the real answer to this question happens before the trip: never route through a stop you cannot skip.
The 10-minute protocol on arrival
Minute 1–3: switch stalls. Individual stall failure is far more common than site failure. Move to a stall that is not the dead one’s cabinet partner — paired stalls (1A/1B) often fail together.
Minute 3–5: restart the handshake. Failed session-starts are the most common failure mode on non-Tesla networks. Unplug fully, re-seat the connector, reinitiate from the app rather than the card reader. One retry is worth it. Three are not.
Minute 5–7: call the network. The support number is on the cabinet. Networks can remotely reboot a stall, and it works more often than you would expect. This also creates the outage record that gets the stall fixed.
Minute 7–10: commit to the fallback. If nothing has delivered power by now, leave. Every minute spent hoping is range you may need to reach the alternative.
Knowing your fallback before you need it
The planning rule that removes the panic: at every planned stop, know the next reachable charger and arrive with enough buffer to reach it. On most interstates that is 20–40 miles of reserve. On rural corridors it can mean a much bigger buffer — our corridor guides for I-90, I-84, I-70, and I-5 flag the specific stretches where the fallback is far away, and which single-site stops carry the most risk.
Check recent session activity before you arrive, not just “available” status — a station showing completed sessions in the last few hours actually works, while “available” only means it responded to a ping. Why stations show as working when they are not, and which classes of station fail constantly, is covered in why charging stations are always broken.