From the AG's announcement (and Uber's announcement promises to abide by this definition): New York’s law against price gouging (General Business Law §396-r),

From the AG's announcement (and Uber's announcement promises to abide by this definition): New York’s law against price gouging (General Business Law §396-r), was passed in the winter of 1978-79 in response to escalating heating oil prices. It defines an “abnormal disruption of the market” as “any change in the market, whether actual or imminently threatened, resulting from stress of weather, convulsion of nature, failure or shortage of electric power or other source of energy, strike, civil disorder, war, military action, national or local emergency, or other cause of an abnormal disruption of the market which results in the declaration of a state of emergency by the governor.”