No offence, but you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. Surge pricing is indeed an automatic thing. It triangulates demand in a particular area and if there are not enough Uber drivers to meet the demand, the price increases based on the demand and supply, thus bringing more drivers into the city and then eventually bringing the price down. There isn't someone in an office somewhere going, "Ooh, a hostage crisis, lets bump surge pricing by a factor of 4 for some sweet profits"

The person who wrote that sentence explained what happened, of course a real person wrote it, it's a blog post. Automatic surge pricing kicked in, like it does anywhere in the world because there was high demand and not enough Uber drivers. While the app is smart, it can't automatically detect when there is a hostage crisis happening in the area and turn off surge pricing...

Such an uninformed response from the likes of a Hacker News user is actually worrying. I thought everyone here mostly understood how Uber works, obviously not.