The key facts

  • The Competition Committee is studying the validity of taxi aggregators' price increases and compliance with antimonopoly legislation
  • After the Yandex Go outages on October 9 and 11, demand for competitors grew: Uklon — 2–3 times, MyTaxi — orders up 15 times on average
  • Aggregators were instructed to revise pricing algorithms, fix payout problems, and unblock drivers

The Committee began studying pricing

The Committee for the Development of Competition and Protection of Consumer Rights of Uzbekistan has begun studying the cost of taxi aggregators' services and possible signs of unfair competition in their activities. According to the agency, in recent days, against the backdrop of "technical outages in the operation of major aggregators," the cost of trips with competitors during peak hours rose several times over, which, as the committee notes, caused justified public objections. During the study, the agency intends to assess the validity of the price increases and compliance with competition legislation. If violations are identified, an inspection will be conducted and measures provided for by law will be taken.

Requirements for aggregators

Aggregators were advised to revise the settings of their trip pricing algorithms to prevent sharp and artificial price increases. In addition, companies must fix glitches in transferring drivers' earnings to their accounts, unblock drivers who were blocked without justification, recalculate and pay all bonuses due for completed orders, refrain from unfair competition, including by persons acting in the companies' interests, and ensure uninterrupted operation of round-the-clock technical support centers. "Any actions in the competitive environment must not contradict the interests of consumers, and the cost and quality of services must be based on the principles of fairness and transparency," the agency emphasized.

Yandex Go outages and growing demand for competitors

On the evening of October 9, a Yandex Go outage lasting about an hour occurred in Uzbekistan; that day, drones attacked Yandex's data center in the Kaluga region of Russia. On the morning of October 11, users again encountered problems: the app did not show trip costs and did not allow ordering a taxi, and the public transport section did not display bus movements. The same day, Yandex Cloud reported damage to a data center in Vladimir as a result of a drone attack; the data center's operation was completely halted. According to Spot, on October 11–13 demand for other aggregators rose sharply: Uklon's general director in Uzbekistan Eduard Kovtun reported a 2–3 fold increase in orders, MyTaxi managing partner Alexey Shitov — an average 15-fold increase in the number of orders, and a 3-fold increase in drivers on the road.

Yandex's position and user problems

Yandex Uzbekistan told Gazeta that the services use distributed computing infrastructure, so an outage in one country can affect the availability of individual functions in another, and errors are also possible during load redistribution. The company assured that Uzbek users' data is protected and stored in a jurisdiction that ensures its proper protection. On the evening of October 12, the company announced the gradual restoration of services: payments to partner taxi fleets went through automatically in the usual manner, instant payouts to drivers were available, but individual payments could go through with errors or delays. Some users reported errors when paying, charges for trips that did not take place, and duplicate charges for a single service; according to them, as of October 15, some of the funds had not yet been returned. Passengers also said drivers asked to pay for trips in cash amid problems with payouts through the service. The company promised to review all cases of erroneous charges, warning that due to the increased load on support, resolving issues may take more time.