Thousands of Uber Eats users across the United States and United Kingdom found themselves staring at error screens on Friday, 20 February 2026, as the food delivery app ground to a halt. The disruption hit across multiple fronts simultaneously—customers could not place orders, could not log in, and could not get any help from the platform’s in-app customer support bot, leaving them with no channel to raise complaints.
Uber Eats experienced a possible outage on Friday, with thousands of users reporting issues. More than 3,500 users had reported problems with the platform as of 10:45 am PST, according to Downdetector, which tracks outages by collecting status reports from multiple sources. Most users reporting issues said they were experiencing problems specifically with the app.
‘There Are No Alternative Ways to Reach Out’
What set this outage apart from a routine service dip was the collapse of the customer support function alongside it. Users who had already placed orders—and were now missing items or waiting on refunds—found themselves unable to escalate their complaints through any channel. One user wrote: ‘Literally there are no alternative ways to reach out to @UberEats if their help customer service chat bot is not working… I’m missing items in my order, and I would really like a refund.’ Another added: ‘Is @UberEats app down? I can’t order or use the help feature.’
Others vented their frustration more bluntly. ‘Your service delivery has gone down @UberEats. Today is the last time I use your services,’ one user posted, while another wrote, ‘Amazing how @UberEats not working when I’m trying to hit the help option because my order taking forever.’ The timing compounded the damage—Friday evenings rank among the busiest periods for food delivery platforms globally.
Uber’s Status Page Shows Nothing
Despite the scale of reports flooding in from two countries, Uber’s official status page listed no incidents for 20 February 2026—a stark contrast to the thousands of complaints being logged in real time on outage-tracking platforms. The company issued no public statement acknowledging the disruption at the time of publication.
Outage.report, which monitors social media signals to detect service issues, confirmed it had received reports from users in both the United States and the United Kingdom throughout the day on 20 February. The gap between what users were experiencing and what Uber was officially acknowledging drew criticism of its own, with some users expressing disbelief that no communication had been issued.
Not the First Disruption This Week
The Friday outage did not emerge in isolation. Uber and Uber Eats were also reportedly down for hundreds of users on 18 February 2026, with DownDetector logs showing a surge in user reports around 1:32 pm Eastern Time. Back-to-back disruptions within the same week pointed to a recurring instability in the platform’s infrastructure—one that Uber had yet to address publicly on either occasion.
Reports from 18 February included users encountering ‘access denied’ errors when attempting to place orders, an inability to sign in even after reinstalling the app, payment failures, and an entirely inaccessible business portal. Uber did not acknowledge those incidents publicly either.
For the millions of gig workers who depend on Uber Eats to earn income—delivery drivers who lose pay every time the platform goes dark during peak hours—an unacknowledged outage is more than an inconvenience. It is an uncompensated loss. The platform’s silence during two disruptions in a single week raises pointed questions about how one of the world’s largest food delivery services communicates with its users and its workforce when things go wrong. Uber had not responded publicly at the time this article was published.
Originally published on IBTimes UK
