Uber: Pandemic Layoffs, Business Model, and Current Status

Category: ride-hailing and delivery
Pandemic-layoff role: Additional sourced company
Last updated: 2026-09-25
Related article: The Pandemic Layoff Stress Test

Founders, executives and investors

Dara Khosrowshahi has run Uber since 2017. Uber's biography says he was previously chief executive of Expedia and before that chief financial officer of IAC Travel, and that Uber operates in more than 70 countries.

Business before the pandemic

Uber connects riders and eaters with drivers and couriers who work as independent contractors. "A month ago, Uber was connecting 16 million trips a day," Khosrowshahi wrote on March 31, 2020. "Now, we're urging our riders to stay home if they can." By June, Fortune reported, the virus had cut drivers' rides by as much as 80 percent.

The contractor model was already contested. California's Assembly Bill 5 aimed to reclassify gig workers as employees, and Uber, with Postmates and two drivers, was suing to overturn it, calling it "irrational and unconstitutional."

What the pandemic changed

On March 23, 2020 Khosrowshahi wrote to President Trump asking that the stimulus then being drafted "include protections and benefits for independent workers, not just employees." "My goal in writing to you is not to ask for a bailout for Uber," he wrote, "but rather for support for the independent workers on our platform." He also asked for a "third way" in labor law.

Congress supplied the benefits. The CARES Act's Pandemic Unemployment Assistance covered contractors, and California chose to route Uber and Lyft drivers to that federal program instead of its own unemployment fund, which the companies had not paid into for drivers. KQED's April 2020 headline: "Uber and Lyft Aren't Paying for Drivers' Unemployment: You Are."

SBA's PPP data also carry loans under Uber's name. Twenty-two loans, totaling $294,888 and approved between May 2020 and May 2021, name "Uber Technologies" as the borrower or in the address line at 1455 Market Street, San Francisco. Every one reported a single job and a sole-proprietor or independent-contractor business type; seven were for $20,833. Nineteen were forgiven, for $258,596, and three were charged off. The data do not say who the borrowers were.

In June 2020 Uber partnered with Kabbage to give drivers a streamlined application for PPP loans, with Uber pre-filling, with the driver's permission, their payroll information. Kabbage said it had by then originated more than 143,000 PPP loans totaling more than $4.15 billion.

The job cuts at Uber itself came in May. On May 6 it laid off 3,700 employees in customer support and recruiting, with the chief executive's letter pointing to more. By Layoffs.fyi's count, Uber cut 6,700 employees in May, and it was among ten startups that offered more than eight weeks of severance and more than four months of extended health coverage.

After the first shock

Uber added to its delivery business. On July 6, 2020 it agreed to buy Postmates for about $2.65 billion in stock. It also kept fighting the classification rules: The Intercept reported that Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Instacart and other gig companies spent more than $200 million on California's Proposition 22, which exempted ride-hailing and delivery apps from the state's test; Ballotpedia lists Uber as the largest donor, at $59.5 million. The Intercept also reported that Uber alone spent $540,000 lobbying Congress in the first quarter of 2021, including on the PRO Act.

Since 2025

Uber is a public company, listed on the New York Stock Exchange as UBER, and Khosrowshahi remains chief executive.

Uber Profile: Pandemic Layoffs, Business Model, and Current Status

Founders, executives and investors

Business before the pandemic

What the pandemic changed

After the first shock

Since 2025

Sources