Uber has said that a system glitch was to blame for a number of customers who were massively overcharged for their rides over this past weekend.
Users of the service in the UK and also the US were apparently affected, according to a report in the Telegraph, with complaints popping up on Twitter. A number of folks complained of being charged around £70-£80 for very short trips that shouldn’t have been much more than a tenner.
Sharna Tommy Egan tweeted: "So @Uber charged me £82 for a job which was only meant to be £10-14. Sort this out".
On Saturday, the Uber Support account tweeted: "Some riders & drivers may experience issues requesting and completing trips. Our team is on it and things should be back to normal shortly".
That was quickly followed up by: "We had a glitch earlier... Issues requesting & completing trips should be resolved".
An Uber spokesman told the Telegraph: "Due to a brief error, a small number of trips were incorrectly charged over the weekend. This has since been rectified and all those affected are being refunded".
Refunds were of course only to be expected. Uber might be worth some $41 billion, but it can’t afford bad publicity -- or at least no more bad publicity than it already gets.
There are plenty of anti-Uber protests being organized by licensed taxi cab drivers across the globe, and the latest one we’ve heard about is in Montréal, with taxi drivers threatening to block bridges in the city.
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