UBER CEO TRAVIS Kalanick resigned late Tuesday night from the company he cofounded in 2009. While he’ll remain on the board of directors, Kalanick’s departure comes after months, if not years, of reports of a toxic workplace culture, cutthroat business tactics, and the occasional public embarrassment.
It’s not clear who will replace Kalanick. But what is clear is that this person will have a lot to correct. Here’s a timeline of many, many upheavals that led the $69-billion startup to this crisis point.
August 2013: On August 16, a group of Uber drivers file a class-action lawsuit in federal court in which they claim they have been misclassified as independent contractors. This issue cuts to the core of Uber’s business model, which depends on drivers not being official employees. The drivers in the suit ask for employee benefits, including mileage and tip reimbursement. The case drags on for three years. In 2016, Uber agrees to a $100 million settlement, but the court declined to approve it. Currently, the case is stayed until at least the fall of this year.
December 2013: On New Year’s Eve, an Uber driver runs into a family in a San Francisco crosswalk, killing a 6-year-old girl and seriously injuring her mother and brother. The girl’s family sue Uber, but the ride-hailing giant fights back. According to Uber, the driver wasn’t covered by the company insurance at the time, because while he did have the Uber app open and was waiting to book a ride, he hadn’t actually accepted a fare and had no passenger in the car—meaning he wasn’t technically working for Uber at that moment.
The incident raises serious questions about how and when ride-hailing companies like Uber can be held liable for damages. In the aftermath, Uber faces pressure to overhaul and bolster its insurance policies.
February 2014: As Uber becomes more successful, the profile of its headstrong CEO, Travis Kalanick, rises. In a GQ profile of Kalanick published in February 2014, a reporter suggests that Kalanick must be finding more success with women since Uber is doing so well as a company. Kalanick’s response: “Yeah, we call that Boob-er.” This comment presages his sometimes troubling relationship with women.
January 2014: In January, Valleywag and Techcrunch confirm that NYC-based Uber employees routinely and deliberately ordered thousands of rides from competitors Gett and Lyft, only to cancel them later, in order to mess with their operations.
June 2014: Large-scale taxi driver strikes crop up, the biggest of which are staged in London, Berlin, Paris, and Madrid. A global protest movement begins. A year later, in June 2015, Paris cabbies show their dislike of Uber by burning tires and overturning cars.
July 2014: The company attracts a lot of criticism for its use of dynamic or surge pricing—a scheme in which Uber’s fares can rise dramatically when rider demand is high. Users especially criticized Uber when surge pricing kicked in during emergencies, like Hurricane Sandy. In July 2014, Uber finally addresses the issue, promising New York’s attorney general that it would limit the cost of hailing a car in the event of a crisis.
August 2014: The Verge reveals a secret internal project at Uber called Operation SLOG, dedicated to luring drivers away from Lyft, and gathering intelligence on Lyft’s operations.
October 2014: Forbes reports that Uber has a “God View” and a “Creepy Stalker View”—a GPS trick that could track any user’s location information while they are on the go. The revelation prompts an outcry from the public, but Uber doesn’t yet act on it. Then, in November, a BuzzFeed news reporter says she’d been tracked on her way to a meeting with a general manager of the company. Eventually the company agrees to pay a $20,000 fine after an investigation from New York’s attorney general.
November 2014: Then senior vice president of Uber Emil Michael suggests at a private dinner that Uber hire a team of opposition researchers and journalists, with a million-dollar budget, to dig into the personal lives of its critics. BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith reports the incident, which makes the national news. The comment follows years of accusations that Uber has routinely and vindictively targeted journalists who write negative pieces about the company. Michael is eventually forced to apologize.
December 2014: India’s Delhi region bans Uber’s car-hailing service in the wake of explosive allegations that an Uber driver raped a female passenger. More questions are raised about whether Uber’s driver background checks are thorough enough.
May 2015: Uber hires away dozens of Carnegie Mellon University scientists to bolster its self-driving-car effort, reportedly leaving one of the world’s top robotics institutions in a crisis.
February 2016: A man who drove for Uber is accused of killing six people in a Kalamazoo, Michigan, shooting spree, which prompts more concerns about Uber’s background check process.
June 2016: BuzzFeed publishes a report that raises new questions about how much Uber drivers really make. According to the piece, drivers could be barely earning more than an hourly retail employee.
In 2017, the crises have come so fast they’ve piled up on one another. We lay them out here by day.

January 29, 2017: The #DeleteUber hashtag campaign goes viral after Uber users—including many celebrities—balk at what they consider is the company attempt to profit during a taxi strike protesting Donald Trump’s immigration ban at New York City’s JFK Airport. Also in January, Uber agrees to pay $20 million to the US government to resolve an FTC complaint that it misled drivers about potential earnings.
February 19: In late February, former Uber engineer Susan Fowler publishes an explosive blog post in which she accuses Uber of fostering a misogynistic corporate culture. A few days later, Google autonomous driving spinoff Waymo files a lawsuit claiming Uber boosted its self-driving program by stealing Waymo’s trade secrets.
February 20: Uber brings in former US attorney general Eric Holder to conduct an independent assessment of Uber’s culture.
February 28: Senior executive Amit Singhal leaves after he fails to disclose a sexual harassment allegation filed against him at his previous company, Google.
March 1: Bloomberg publishes an embarrassing tape of Kalanick swearing at an Uber driver.
March 3: The New York Times reports on an internal tool called Greyball, which uses data collected from the Uber app to make it impossible for certain individuals to use Uber—including law enforcement officers.
March 24: The Information reports five employees, including Kalanick, visited a karaoke bar known for offering escort services during a trip to South Korea three years ago—and that a female employee who was on the trip complained to human resources about it.
June 6: The law firm Perkins Coie completes an investigation of 215 staff complaints going back to 2012, which leads to the firing of 20 employees.
June 7: Uber fires an executive who reportedly illegally obtained the private medical records of the alleged victim of a rape in India in 2014, and showed those records to Kalanick and his second-in-command, Emil Michael. (The victim has since sued Uber for violating her privacy.)
June 12: Emil Michael agrees to leave Uber.
June 13–14: Eric Holder’s report comes out. It’s damning, and includes recommendations to limit Kalanick’s responsibilities at the company, appoint an independent chairman, and create an oversight committee on the company board. One day later, Travis Kalanick agrees to take an indefinite leave of absence from the company. A member of Uber’s board of directors, David Bonderman, also resigns after he makes an unsavory joke about women at a company all-hands meeting. Bonderman had interrupted fellow board member Ariana Huffington when she said it was a good thing that the ratio of women on Uber’s board had increased from 14 to 25 percent. “Actually, what it shows is that it’s much more likely to be more talking,” he said.
June 20: Uber launches “180 days of change,” a PR campaign aiming to rehabilitate the company’s embattled public image—starting with a promise to let riders tip drivers on the platform.
June 21: Travis Kalanick resigns as CEO after pressure from five big Uber investors, including venture capital firms Benchmark, First Round Capital, Menlo Ventures, and Lowercase Capital, and the mutual fund Fidelity Investments.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.wired.com