Have Uber’s issues vanished as abruptly as they appeared? Uber services appear to be operating normally again after more than a week of disruption, but there remains no word from the company on the reason for the outage, one of the ride-hailing company’s agents tells Al Mal. A number of Uber drivers reportedly staged a strike until the service’s functionality was restored. The company’s local agents had also reportedly instructed drivers to rely on VPN to sidestep the disruption. In tests overnight, one of us had no problem locating a ride on Uber (without using a VPN). Another of us found that no vehicles were available, but was offered Black and Lux and Van options that were (to us) new.

Background: Earlier last month, we started poking into possible explanations for why Uber has been largely unusable over the past couple of weeks. A source with whom we spoke drew a line between the outage and what the source said is ongoing friction over unspecified “changes” to the still-not-released executive regulations to the ride sharing law.