A simple communication mix-up between a tech professional and his taxi driver has taken social media by storm — thanks to a translation error that briefly turned an Uber pickup into a life-and-death situation.
Arnav Gupta, who works at Meta, shared on X (formerly Twitter) that he asked his Uber driver to wait a few minutes before getting out of his home. Moments later, he received a notification that read: “I am facing a murder threat.”
The unexpected notice stunned him.
“Is he threatening to kill me because I kept him waiting? Or is someone threatening him because he blocked the road?” Gupta wrote and described the panic that followed.
Trying to understand the context, he tapped the translate option in the Uber app – and realized the alarm message was simply a machine-translated error.
The driver wrote in Hindi: “Murder Dairy ke samne hun” – which should have been “Mother Dairy ke samne hun”. The app translated Mother Dairy as “murder,” turning a routine location update into a chilling misunderstanding.
Gupta joked that once he decoded the message, he “breathed the biggest sigh of relief in a long time”.
As of Friday, the post has 4,700 views on the platform, prompting light-hearted reactions about mistranslations and the dangers of AI-assisted communication.
The Mint could not independently verify the authenticity of the post.
The Internet is responding
One user questioned the mix-up, asking, “Shouldn’t the original Hindi message appear in the notification first?”
Gupta replied that the notification was likely to be automatically translated because his Uber account was set to the UK region. “I think that’s why the English translation showed up right away,” he explained.
Another commenter called it “one of the most hilarious horror stories ever”, while a third simply wrote: “Top notch storytelling”.
