Business Insider reportsIt has been alleged that several Uber drivers in the United States have recently reported strange behavior with the "Trip Radar" function on the Uber service app: when a driver accepts a trip, the system displays "trip has been taken," but then immediately another identical trip invitation pops up, only this time with a lower price.
In response, Uber's Chief Product Officer (CPO) Sachin Kansal made a rare appearance on the social media platform X, acknowledging it as a "system glitch" and promising to fix it.
Switching from left hand to right hand, will I lose $3 in salary?
This issue primarily affects Uber's Trip Radar feature, which was launched four years ago. This feature pushes trip information to multiple drivers simultaneously, allowing them to compete for the ride.
However, screenshots provided by Massachusetts drivers suggest that this mechanism appears to have a serious pricing loophole:
• Case number one:The driver initially saw a quote of $11.45 for a 5.5-mile trip. After accepting, the system indicated the trip was invalid, and then the same trip was offered again, but the quote was only $8.84 (a loss of $2.61).
• Case XNUMX:Another trip changed from $12.53 to $11.60.
The driver complained that this situation of "unequal pay for equal work" has occurred frequently in the past month, and that "the second quote is always lower than the first one," never higher.
Here we go again. Since the rideshare apps won't provide an explanation for this ongoing algorithmic wage and labor exploitation of gig workers — and refuse to stop — maybe it's time to bring these things to the attention of the Massachusetts AG's office? pic.twitter.com/lkSO09FLv3
— matt (@boston_drives) January 21, 2026
Uber executives: It wasn't intentional, it was a system error.
In response to an angry post by a driver tagging the Massachusetts Attorney General's office on the X, Uber's Chief Product Officer, Sachin Kansal, personally replied to quell the controversy.
Sachin Kansal explained that this was not an intentional attempt to suppress wages, but rather a system error. Possible causes include passengers canceling and immediately rebooking, causing the system's algorithm to recalculate the price in a very short time. He emphasized that this was "not a fair or acceptable experience" and stated that Uber has begun rolling out fixes to prevent similar "nearly identical trips" from being repriced (lowered) for the same driver within a short period.
Is the algorithm a black box?
According to Sergio Avedian, a well-known gig economy blogger, Uber typically pushes new orders to drivers via Trip Radar when they are about to finish their previous trip, giving them very little reaction time (about 10 seconds). This often leaves drivers with no time to calculate and they can only accept orders based on intuition.
Although Uber emphasizes that it was a system error, Sergio Avedian believes that even if the error only affected a small portion of the millions of trips every day, the cumulative losses for drivers who rely on every penny would still be considerable.
