Uber Drivers Say They're Getting Locked Out of the App and Trapped in a Kafkaesque Limbo When They Try to Dispute It

For nearly ten years, Bernard Moses had been ferrying passengers around Chicagoland as an Uber driver. But after dropping off his umpteenth passenger one day in April 2024, Moses recalls that he swiped to find his next rider — only to discover he'd been locked out of his Uber driver account. A message came up, telling him he had been suspended due to a customer complaint.

After logging over 20,000 rides and earning an average rating of 4.99 out of 5, Moses had been locked out of his primary source of income by his phone screen. To find out what happened, he said he called a support number listed on the app, only to be met with an answering machine at the end of a long chain of automated prompts — an effort he would repeat multiple times a day for weeks.

About a month later, Moses received two missed calls from a man who identified himself as "Jon," claiming to be an Uber employee looking into his case. When Moses' return call went unanswered, he tried again — and again, and again — "hundreds of times" throughout the next two months, to no avail. 

It was only months after, when hailing an Uber for his son, that Moses discovered his rider account was also locked down — one last parting gift from the multi-billion-dollar rideshare giant. Nearly a year after, Moses says he would still like closure for the seemingly random event that upended his life as he knew it, though he knows it’s not likely.

Moses had just experienced "deactivation": the jarring moment when loyal gig workers find that they've been locked out of a work platform — cutting them off from earning a living and often casting them into a Kafkaesque labyrinth of cookie-cutter emails, tortuous call center loops, and AI chatbots that seem to goad them into giving up, all while their livelihood hangs in the balance.

While tech behemoths like Uber and Lyft market gig work as a type of side hustle, their platforms are often the primary source of income for their majority-immigrant and minority labor force, meaning deactivations like the one Moses faced can be devastating for some of the most precarious workers in the US. His case is just one of many in the rideshare landscape, a growing issue that labor organizers are calling a "deactivation crisis."

A new report by an advocacy group called the Action Center on Race and the Economy (ACRE) surveyed 727 rideshare drivers who had been deactivated within the last five years, who shared infuriating details about their experiences.

Though drivers reported the leading cause for deactivation was customer complaints, others say their accounts were nixed for a variety of reasons including facial-recognition background checks, self-reported safety incidents, and community guideline violations. A whopping 15 percent of drivers reported receiving no reason for deactivation, leaving them guessing as to why their livelihood was suddenly taken away.

In most cases, deactivation comes as a total shock — 85 percent were deactivated without prior warning, many in the middle of a work day. Its effects can be catastrophic, leading to evictions, homelessness, food insecurity, and more. According to ACRE's survey, close to two-thirds of drivers reported falling behind on bills, while 14 percent faced the loss of their homes.

Once a driver is deactivated, getting reinstated can be a herculean task, because they have virtually no control over the process or what evidence the company considers. Worse yet, drivers often lack even basic information about their case, thanks to Uber's "disruptive" management style.

Because Uber isn’t legally obligated to give its drivers basic protections like access to human resources or unemployment insurance — not to mention minimum wage — it gets away with treating them like nagging customers, a model data scholar Alex Rosenblat calls "customer-service-as-management." 

When Denver Uber driver Karim Sawadogo dialed the driver support line for what felt like the thousandth time, he says he was stunned to find Uber had blocked his number. Friends' phones likewise became blocked as he did anything he could to reach Uber support.

A more than full-time driver in Denver for seven years, the first-generation Burkinabé immigrant had clocked over 20,000 Uber rides before he says he was locked out, after a rider accused him of drinking and driving. Though Sawadogo says he doesn’t drink for religious reasons, he nonetheless flagged down a cop as soon as the allegation came across his phone screen. While any drunk driver would’ve been arrested on the spot, the officer instead directed Sawadogo to a drug and alcohol clinic to start a paper trail right away. Unfortunately for him, that wasn't enough for Uber’s opaque system of rules.

"Even when I send them the copy they keep me locked out, for almost nine months," Sawadogo told us. "I keep sending messages. At a certain point they locked me out [altogether], so I have no way to send them messages." That’s when he started calling, until that too was blocked.

"I didn’t know what to do with my life. It’s getting bad. I’m behind on all my bills, my car, my house," he said.

Desperate to claw back his livelihood, Sawadogo went all in.

"I decided, I said hey, you know what, I’m just gonna go to California to see what those guys are doing," he recalled. Spending what remained of his cash, he flew to San Francisco, where he called in some favors to get a ride from the airport straight to Uber headquarters.

Like his prior attempts, that was also a bust. Despite having records proving his innocence, a desk worker told Sawadogo there was nothing he could do, and to "come back in three days," presumably hoping he’d give up. Determined to see it through, Sawadogo returned, this time talking to a different worker who heard him out. "I was so surprised, it only took him like 10 minutes to get me back," he said. "Someone could have done that in the last nine months."

Sawadogo considers himself lucky. While his tenacity is remarkable, his story illustrates the extreme lengths drivers are forced to go for a chance at regaining their livelihoods. 

Nowadays when an Uber driver is deactivated, their first point of contact isn’t with someone from Uber HR, but with an AI chatbot — the kind that might make you tear your hair out trying to get a refund for those Weezer tickets. 

Algorithmic decision making is key to Uber's business model. It pairs riders with drivers, tracks trip frequency, and deactivates drivers en masse. Though these algorithms save Uber boatloads of money, ACRE notes that they work as "tools for workforce control," a coercive, automated threat looming over Uber drivers at all hours of the day. 

The ever-present threat of this kind of tech creates what ACRE calls a "strong incentive for drivers to comply with corporate and passenger demands — even when they are unfair, unsafe, or economically disadvantageous."

A former driver in the San Francisco Bay Area named April Granado says she averaged well over 50 hours of work per week, notching over 3,000 Uber rides in her first year alone. In May of 2024, she had an altercation with a belligerent rider who refused to follow California’s and Uber’s child safety seat laws. When the rider continued to escalate and threaten Granado, the driver says she cancelled the ride and reported the incident to Uber, before driving off and continuing her work day.

Days later, Granado received a late-night message from Uber that her account had been permanently deactivated. 

Although that was the end of her full-time rideshare job, it was far from the first time Uber had made her choose between her comfort and a rider’s request. Granado reported previously being harangued by riders over masks at the height of Covid, uncomfortable advances by men, requests to escort riders into doctors' offices, and a customer who insisted that she roll down the window in the midst of the recent Los Angeles Wildfires, as the air glowed orange with ash.

There's also a specter of racial bias in ACRE's findings. Black drivers report being deactivated for customer complaints at a rate 7 percent higher than their white counterparts, while having their accounts reinstated at lower rates. Meanwhile, drivers of Latin American descent reportedly received no explanation for their permanent suspension at a rate of 20 percent, compared to 15 percent for all other drivers.

There are, however, small glints of hope for rideshare drivers. A number of groups throughout the US are organizing gig workers to fight back against deactivation through mutual aid efforts like translation assistance and "deactivation clinics," as well as through local and state grassroots policy drives. 

In cities like Seattle and Minneapolis, civic leaders have recently passed ordinances mandating protections for gig workers from deactivation, despite Uber’s bullying. That’s setting an example for cities like Chicago, which just proposed an ordinance to enshrine due process for drivers facing deactivation, as well as minimum wage. Deactivation regulation is currently being reviewed by Virginia lawmakers, meanwhile, as Uber takes two Colorado labor protections bills to court, alleging that transparency laws violate its first amendment rights.

Still, there's a long road ahead for the 7.8 million Uber drivers worldwide. While gig work platforms tout unlimited flexibility for hustlers and grinders, they consistently fail to provide even the most basic worker protections, leaving some of the country’s most vulnerable workers at the mercy of unaccountable algorithms.

"They treat you like a machine," Sawadogo said of his ordeal. "If the machine doesn’t do what you want, [they] just turn it off and go to the next."

Updated to clarify the circumstances around April Granado's deactivation.

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