S$1,500 for a Grab ride from Kallang to Simei? Glitch fixed in minutes.

Something appears to be up with the fees charged for Grab transport in Singapore.

On Aug. 20, multiple users reported unrealistic prices for a standard Grab trip to and from locations around Singapore at around 12pm.

Bemused Grab users took to social media, sharing screenshots of their super expensive fares.

A member of the Complaint Singapore Facebook group shared screenshots of the Grab app, which displayed a price of around S$1,500 for a trip between what appeared to be Punggol and the Singapore Zoo.

Another user reported a similarly massive fare for a trip from Kallang to Simei.

One Grab driver commented: "No wonder so quiet... system glitch."

The issue appeared to have been fixed in minutes.

In response to Mothership's queries, a Grab spokesperson said: "We encountered a temporary system issue that led to abnormally high prices being wrongly displayed in our app. The issue has been resolved, and the app is now functioning as usual. We deeply regret the inconvenience caused."

Mothership understands that the issue happened for about 17 minutes and if passengers tried to book rides with such high fares, they would not go through.

Grab said in a subsequent statement:

"Earlier today we had a system error that resulted in Grab's app displaying unusually high prices. We know this was an unwelcome surprise, and we sincerely apologise for this. This was due to a misconfigured fee, which we corrected within 20 minutes. While Grab's safeguards automatically prevented most bookings with incorrect charges from going through, we did find some users who were affected by today's errors. For every user who was affected, we've already processed full refunds for the incorrect charges as of 9pm today. We are doing everything to learn from this so it doesn't happen again. Our customers trust us with their daily needs and we don't take this for granted."

Top image from Facebook.