Hong Kong (CNN Business) China's top ride-hailing firm is walking back one of its newest features after users accused the company of discriminating against women by preventing them using one of its services in the late evening.

Didi Chuxing earlier this week announced it would resume its controversial carpooling service, Hitch, for the first time since taking it offline last year following the killings of two female passengers . In a bid to improve passenger safety, it said it would only let women book rides until 8:00 p.m., while men could use the platform until 11:00 p.m.

Following a huge backlash on Chinese social media, the company has backpedaled fast. Didi said on Friday that the earlier cutoff would now apply to all customers regardless of gender.

"We agree that the public trial service for Hitch should be available to all users on the same schedule and decided to set the service time between [5:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m.] for everybody," the company said.

As of Friday morning, the hashtag "#WomenCan'tTakeDidiAfter8PM" was trending on Chinese social network Weibo, generating over a thousand posts on the Twitter-like service.

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