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Yes the beginning was in late January 2017, involving a taxi strike at a NYC area airport and Uber's messaging around continuing to operate to serve the airport
by myhrvold 3y ago
Yes the beginning was in late January 2017, involving a taxi strike at a NYC area airport and Uber's messaging around continuing to operate to serve the airport and surge pricing. That's how the delete Uber hashtag arose and it just continued with wave after wave of negative stories for the next few months.
The whole way things unfolded subsequently (due to several other pile-ons in following weeks, and eventually TK's ouster in mid 2017) still seems surreal to this day.
(I worked at Uber for ~5 yrs and remember this time period well.)
- jhatemyjob 3y agoIt wasn't Susan Fowler? I thought she caused all that mess.
- myhrvold 3y agoNope that was nearly a month after -- toward the end of February as I recall. #DeleteUber started when Uber turned off surge to an airport from a taxi strike. It was headline news already by the end of January: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/31/business/delete-uber.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/31/business/delete-uber.html And people somehow thought that getting rid of surge temporarily was a bad thing, or using that message to take advantage of the situation. (I don't know exactly what the rationale was, because it still doesn't make sense to me after all these years...)