Grab customers in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam faced difficulties booking their rides in the morning, with Grab saying that it is facing a technical issue with its app. — Picture by Grab via TODAY

SINGAPORE, March 1 — A technical glitch experienced by ride-hailing firm Grab has affected tens of thousands of commuters across the region this morning.

Grab customers in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam faced difficulties booking their rides in the morning, with Grab saying that it is facing a technical issue with its app.

“Currently, we are working hard to improve it and our app will be back online soon,” said the Twitter accounts of both Grab Malaysia and Grab Indonesia.

“We apologise for the inconvenience and hope to serve you again soon!”

A check an hour later showed that the app was still down for some users, although others were progressively able to book rides using cash and GrabPay-linked cards.

At about 8.30am today, the Singapore-based company first announced that it is facing a technical issue with its app, and some rides may only accept cash payments.

“Our engineers are already looking into this and we expect to be back up in 30 minutes,” said Grab on its Facebook post. However, the post was subsequently taken down.

An hour later at about 9.20am, Grab posted another update on its Facebook page and said users can book rides using GrabPay linked cards apart from cash.

“We are still working on GrabPay Credits and Rewards,” it added. “Rest assured your balances will reappear in app once we do!”

A Singapore teacher who only wanted to be known as Low, 59, was trying to book a Grab car to get to school at around 6.30am when she encountered an error message: The server was down.

She turned to Uber instead as she was in a rush and could not walk out to hail a taxi.

“I’ve never encountered this problem before. It went on for at least half an hour,” she added.

A 40-year-old Grab driver who declined to be named said that he was unable to log into the Grab app from 7am to 8.30am. The full-time driver said that he expects to suffer at least S$60 (RM178) in earnings during the outage. However, he was able to log into the app and take bookings since 8.30am. So far, he has taken three bookings. — TODAY