Anyone familiar with surge pricing knows how quickly Uber fares can shoot up, but, barring the event of an actual apocalypse, $18,518 seems excessive for a roughly 20-minute-long car ride.

An Uber customer in Toronto was stunned on Friday to learn that his 5.6 km trip from The Entertainment District to St. Joseph's Hospital had cost him as as much as the price of a brand new car.

He shared a screenshot of his Uber bill on Instagram, where it was subsequently grabbed by a friend and published to Twitter.

My friend was charged 18K for a 20 Min ride (!), and they are sticking to it. What in the world??? This is insane! @Uber_Support @badassboz @Uber pic.twitter.com/RjFihVLKIC — Emily Kennard (@emilykennard) December 9, 2017

The woman who tweeted about her friend's situation on Saturday had initially written that Uber was "sticking to it."

Another person shared a screenshot of the Uber receipt on the Bunz Helping Zone Facebook page, according to The Sun, writing similarly that Uber would not refund the man's money.

"Uber WILL NOT reverse the charge and have stopped responding to his messages," read the Facebook post. "SO how do we start a s—storm to get Uber's attention and get my friend his money back."

A Twitter user who appeared to be the rider in question, Hisham Salama‏, also shared an image of the conversation he'd been having with Uber Support through his app on Saturday morning.

"It looks like the destination of drop off wasn't the destination initially entered in the app when the trip was requested," wrote someone on behalf of the company, in response to why the user had been charged more than $18K for what should have been a $12-16 trip.

@Uber @Uber_Support what turned out to be an honest mistake is now turning into the biggest blunder of 2017. I’m no longer laughing at wondering when #uber will get their act together. Can anyone help? Obviously, no 20 min fare is $18,500. pic.twitter.com/zBhtMSBy67 — Hisham Salama (@The_Hish) December 9, 2017

Later on Saturday, the Bunz post was updated to say that the customer had been refunded his $18,518.50.

Uber said in a statement that the massive charge was simply "an error" that had been resolved as of Saturday morning.

"We have provided a full refund to this rider and apologized to him for this experience," wrote an Uber spokesperson to Slate. "We have safeguards in place to help prevent something like this from happening, and we are working to understand how this occurred."

Let's hope they can figure it out before New Year's Eve, when it can get a lot harder to tell the difference between outrageous errors and outrageous surge fares.