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Can a taxi or private hire operator keep taking bookings when its dispatch app goes down?
The screen goes blank. Drivers are still on the road, customers are still calling and several passengers are waiting for cars they believe are coming. For a taxi or private hire operator, a dispatch outage is immediately a service and safety problem, not just an IT problem.
Outside London, section 56 of the Local Government (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1976 requires a licensed PHV operator to record the prescribed particulars of each booking before the journey starts. The form of that record is set by the licensing authority’s conditions. An unavailable platform does not switch off the requirement.
The Department for Transport recommends recording the passenger’s name, request time, pick-up point, destination, driver and vehicle details, and the people who took and dispatched the booking. Those details allow a journey to be traced if a passenger goes missing, a complaint is made or a driver needs help.
The first decision during an outage is therefore whether the operator can still accept and allocate work lawfully. That depends on its licence conditions and what reliable systems remain available. Continuing to promise collections while losing track of the allocated cars is not a credible fallback.
Conditions vary. Bury requires electronic, chronological booking records available for inspection. North Northamptonshire’s published policy permits specified paper or computerised records and requires electronic records to be backed up. An operator must design its contingency around its own authority’s rules, not assume a notebook is always sufficient.
Where a manual process is permitted, it needs a controlled booking number, time stamp, passenger and journey details, verified driver and vehicle identity, and a named person responsible for dispatch. Loose messages scattered across controllers’ personal phones are difficult to reconcile and protect.
Existing bookings need immediate attention. Staff should identify which journeys were confirmed, which were only requested and which vehicles actually received an instruction. A passenger should not be left believing a car is on its way when the allocation never reached the driver.
The same discipline applies to changes. If a driver declines a job or a vehicle is replaced, the fallback record should show who made the decision and which licensed driver and vehicle ultimately carried the passenger.
Operators should tell customers when a booking channel is unavailable and offer only the alternatives they can genuinely manage. A recorded telephone line or staffed booking desk may be useful, whereas an unattended app that continues accepting requests is not.
A dispatch outage can also hide a cyber incident. Staff should establish whether the problem is a supplier failure, loss of connectivity, accidental deletion or unauthorised access before restoring systems or circulating customer data.
The National Cyber Security Centre advises small organisations to identify critical systems in advance and keep tested backups of essential information. It warns that using a cloud supplier does not remove the need for an independent, recoverable copy of critical data.
A backup alone is not a business-continuity plan. The operator must know how controllers will contact drivers, confirm licensing and insurance information, locate vulnerable passengers, handle payments and reach its supplier when the main system is unavailable. Testing that plan is also crucial. A short exercise outside peak hours can reveal missing driver numbers, inaccessible backup files or a paper form that omits the vehicle registration. Discovering those gaps on a Friday night is much more expensive.
If personal information has been lost, exposed or accessed unlawfully, the operator must assess whether it is a reportable data breach. The Information Commissioner’s Office says qualifying breaches must be reported without undue delay and, where feasible, within 72 hours of becoming aware of them. An ordinary service outage does not automatically meet that test.
Restoration brings a second risk: conflicting records. Manual bookings, cancellations and completed trips must be reconciled with the recovered system before staff treat its displayed status as reliable.
The operator should preserve an incident timeline showing when the outage began, which channels were affected, how bookings were managed and when normal service resumed. That record helps resolve passenger complaints and demonstrates what the business actually did.
A good contingency may mean accepting fewer jobs for a period. That is commercially painful, but controlled capacity is better than a full order book without dependable dispatch or an auditable account of who carried each passenger.
