Can a faulty charger short out the device?

I have a charging station for my kids devices and 3 of the cables are micro usb's. As you can imagine, the cords get switched around quite a bit. A couple of weeks ago, their tablet stopped taking a charge. About a week later, the smart phone followed. Today, I hooked up my son's v-tec kid zoom watch, heard a click, amd then the device switched off. It does not appear to be charging now.

In the phone, I changed out the battery. That was not the problem. I purchased two charger ports to replace on the tablet and the phone, thinking the kids probably bent the ports… But after the experience today, I'm now thinking it was the charger itself.

Is this a thing?? If so, are the devices screwed? Or can they be repaired?