Uber has accidentally leaked the personal details of hundreds of its drivers through a newly launched app.

The controversial company released a new "Uber Partner app" yesterday, which it claimed is "designed to give drivers more information so Uber works better for them".

However, as first reported by Gawker, a design flaw also gave drivers more information about each other by allowing anyone access to nearly 1,000 sensitive scanned documents, including social security numbers, tax forms, insurance documents, driving licenses and taxi certification forms.

The bug apparently appeared when an Uber driver tried to upload or edit such documents, with Gawker writing that they were "warped to a screen that contains documents for complete strangers, a legion of Uber drivers around the United States".

Speaking to Motherboard, an unnamed Uber driver said: "It (the app) started loading hundreds, maybe thousands of other uploaded documents from other Uber drivers. When I looked closer, it might have been the database of Uber drivers that are taxicab drivers that have access to Uber. There were a lot of taxi certification forms and livery drivers licenses."

Uber has responded to the incident, telling IT Pro: "We were notified about a bug impacting a fraction of our US drivers earlier this afternoon. Within 30 minutes our security team had fixed the issue.