Back in the day (1960s?) two relatives of mine had a prank battle going on. One of them posted an add in the local newspaper offering to buy old Christmas trees, at the address of their adversary. Half the city showed up, were told trees were not in fact being bought, and everybody dumped the trees at their door.
This reminds me of a classic (non-internet powered) version of this where every business in London was sent to some unsupecting resident's address in order to win a bet, clogging the streets in the process: The Berners Street Hoax of 1810.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berners_Street_hoax" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berners_Street_hoax</a>
This is what happens when optimists win and the realists are cut out of the conversation.<p>As a taxi service, I believe I would want to know if I'm about to have a shortage of taxis in any one area of town, and I'd better only have a concentration in one area of town for an event the entire world is talking about, like a reunion tour or a championship game.<p>Even with the hack, the moment all of the taxis started converging on one area of town, alarms should have been going off and managers should have been asking questions. But that's not what happened, because we say yes the moment money enters the conversation, without bothering to ask what it says about you as a person if you'll do anything for money, or for that matter if the money is even real or just a trick to get our attention.
The title is kind of misleading.<p>Yandex has thousands of cars here in Moscow. There were around 60 in this jam on the prospect.<p>So most likely not "ordered all avaiable", but "the order was forwareded for all available in the radius" or something like that.<p>Surely you can't order a car in Yadex Taxi much less order all of them or even a car from another part of the city.
this is also something that's oddly absent from the self-driving debates. Mass deployment of the same models or apis in automated systems is very brittle because it means errors are highly correlated. it's like a form of central planning.<p>individual drivers or individual taxi firms in a market due to their decentralization are much more robust to any kind of individual failure.<p>People often ask "is the car smarter than the driver?" but the correct question would be if the car, or system is more diverse than the aggregate knowledge of <i>all</i> the participants.
Needs this music
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEyEkbOlMfA&t=690s" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEyEkbOlMfA&t=690s</a>
The message on driver's screen says something like "Note from passenger: Guys and girls, stop feeding the yellow [Yandex], switch to Wheely!"
Someone hacked #YandexTaxi and ordered all available taxis to Kutuzov Prospect in Moscow. Now there is a huge traffic jam with taxis. It‘s like James Bond movie.