DoorDash’s app and its Dasher app were reported down on Wednesday afternoon, leaving users and drivers across the country facing problems with orders, logins and payouts. The outage began around 3:30pm ET, peaked near 4:00pm ET and was still drawing thousands of reports when it started to ease around 4:15pm.
DownDetector showed as many as 5,550 people reporting the outage at its highest point, with 94% saying they had trouble with the app. Another 3% reported login problems and 2% said they could not place food orders. The outage spread across both coasts, with New York City and Los Angeles among the places reporting significant disruption.
The timing mattered because DoorDash is not a niche service. The company has more than 42 million monthly active users, the vast majority of them in the United States, and the app is used for instant delivery of food and groceries. The Dasher app is the working side of that system, the tool delivery drivers use to receive orders and complete runs.
For some drivers, the outage hit directly in the pocket. One user said the Dasher app was down and they could not receive orders, adding that they had just finished a delivery and had not been paid for it. Another driver asked DoorDash to compensate Dashers for the income they were losing if the problem lasted an hour or more. A separate user said they completed an order right before the crash and then found $17 missing. Others vented about the disruption in harsher language, while one customer said an order had been ready at a restaurant for 25 minutes and complained about delivery problems.
The frustration spilled quickly onto social media, where users posted that the service was not working and that they were unable to move forward with deliveries or orders. DownDetector, which tracks outages based on user reports, recorded the surge in complaints as the problem spread from the East Coast to the West Coast. By 4:15pm ET, reports were falling to around 4,732, a sign the outage was easing but had not fully disappeared.
What matters now is whether DoorDash can keep the outage from turning into a wider breakdown in trust. When the app fails, customers cannot order, Dashers cannot work and even completed deliveries can become points of dispute. That leaves the company with the immediate task of restoring service and answering a question many users were already asking out loud: why did the system go down at all?