Uber has confirmed that hackers stole the personal information — including driver's license details — of thousands of its drivers in the United States, after breaking into a third-party technology provider that held the data.
The ride-hailing company said the breach happened at Fireworks AI, a platform that lets developers run and scale open-source AI models. An Uber spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch that the notices going out to drivers relate to "a security incident impacting one of our third-party vendors, Fireworks.ai, which had access to some Uber data."
Uber learned of the incident on October 9, when Fireworks told the company that an unauthorized party had compromised its internal login credentials. By October 13, Uber's investigation had confirmed those credentials were used to reach Uber data. The formal breach notices to affected drivers are dated November 10, while a filing with the California attorney general lists October 7 as the incident date.
At least 7,870 drivers confirmed across three states
Uber has not disclosed a nationwide total, but state filings reviewed by TechCrunch put numbers on part of the damage: driver's license information was stolen for 2,567 people in Massachusetts, 3,430 in South Carolina and about 1,873 in Rhode Island — at least 7,870 drivers in those three states alone. Driver's licenses in Illinois were also affected, though the count there is unclear.
What is not yet known is whether passengers were affected. The documents seen so far concern drivers only, and Uber has not said how many people it is notifying in total.
The Fireworks breach keeps widening
Fireworks first disclosed a breach in October and widened the scope on November 9, saying billing records, incomplete model weights and datasets were also exposed. The company has attributed the intrusion to a financially motivated cybercriminal group whose goal is to sell stolen tokens for accessing large language models. No group has publicly claimed responsibility for the theft.
Uber is the latest big name to surface as a victim. Online productivity startup Notion confirmed its data — including AI chat transcripts, passwords and API keys — was stolen in the same breach, and coding assistant Cursor said this week that a key exposed by Fireworks unlocked a store of its historical agent traces and let attackers plant tampered extension builds.
What Uber is doing for affected drivers
Uber said it severed its data connections with the provider and opened an investigation as soon as it was notified. The company told drivers it has not identified any misuse of their data so far, and is offering free credit monitoring and fraud assistance through Cyberscout, a TransUnion company. Affected drivers have 90 days from the date of their letter to enroll.
For drivers, the stakes are higher than in a typical breach. A driver's license number cannot be reset the way a password can, and it is exactly the kind of durable identity document that fuels fraud for years. The incident is also a reminder of how far a single vendor's security failure can reach: one compromised set of credentials at an AI infrastructure provider has now exposed customers across ride-hailing, productivity software and developer tools.
