#DeleteUber campaign forces Uber to automate and speed up account removal process
After failing to participate in a taxi ban around John F Kennedy airport while protests against President Trump's travel ban went on, Uber found itself on the receiving end of a good deal of flak. The hashtag #DeleteUber spent a lengthy period trending on Twitter as people voiced their disapproval of what they see as a Trump-supporting company.
Irked Uber users who did not like the idea of the company seeming to profit from the refugee and immigration ban were not just flashing the #DeleteUber hashtag around, they were acting on it. But attempts to delete accounts led to frustration, with some people suggesting that Uber was blocking them from killing their account; this was not the case, and the company is speeding up the deletion process.
For reasons best known to itself, Uber's account deletion process required a company employee to manually complete the task. In the normal run of things, this was fairly manageable so Uber never got around to automating account deletion. But the massive increase in the number of account closures over the weekend forced the company's hand.
The initial delays that stemmed from manual processing of so many account closures caused some users to jump to the conclusion that Uber was being awkward when in reality it was just unable to cope with demand. As noticed by the New York Times, late on Sunday the company managed to implement its much-needed automated account deletion system.
Uber is now scrabbling to get back in people's good books and is adopting a tone that tries to make it clear it does not support Trump's travel ban:
Uber changed its cancellation email from a couple days ago to something more direct pic.twitter.com/SgIc1Ea9wB
— letsa go (@ptrmsk) January 31, 2017
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