The personal information of about 50,000 Uber drivers has been accessed by an unknown third party, in one of the largest data breaches to hit the $40bn company.
A Friday afternoon announcement from the ride-hailing app said it had discovered a bug in its systems last September that allowed unauthorised access to some drivers’ names and licence numbers. It fixed that bug, but a subsequent investigation revealed that there had been a “one-time unauthorised access” to the data last May.
Uber said it had not received any “reports of actual misuse” of the data and was notifying affected drivers, but security experts criticised its decision to wait months before alerting them to the breach.