Steve McDougall earned about $900 a week delivering for Uber Eats and DoorDash, whizzing through the heavy traffic of Gloucester, Mass., on an e-bike. The flexible hours allowed him to tend to his 15-year-old daughter and two parents with disabilities.

“It’s not great money, but it’s freedom,” said Mr. McDougall, 40. “I get to come home a lot during the day. I get to go to my daughter’s softball games, practices, doctor’s appointments — anything I need to.”

In November 2023, he received an email from Uber notifying him that his account had been deactivated. It cited “fraudulent activity,” but did not elaborate. He immediately appealed.

“I just wrote a little comment saying, ‘I work six days a week for you guys, I’ve never done anything wrong,’” he said.

Three months later, Uber sent Mr. McDougall an email stating that a review concluded that activity on his account “was fraudulent” and did not reactivate his account. He had completed 1,720 deliveries on the app over more than three years. Relying just on DoorDash deliveries, his income dropped to $500 on a good week, he said.

According to data from Public First, a tech industry group, about 7.3 million Americans earn money by working through an app, like Uber, Lyft, Instacart or DoorDash. The way companies decide to suspend a worker is largely unregulated. For drivers who rely on apps for all or most of their income, deactivation can be a push toward the financial brink.

Some drivers say they were deactivated because of technical snafus, misunderstandings or reasons that are unclear to them, rather than for serious rules violations. Others were removed because of customer complaints. In these cases, ride-hail companies rarely provide the driver with the name of the customer or details like the exact time of the incident because of concerns over privacy. The companies sometimes leave drivers waiting for weeks or months for a resolution.

Mr. McDougall lives with his brother and parents and began delivering for apps after swelling in his legs forced him to quit his job as a clam digger. His brother, who is on the autism spectrum, earns money stocking shelves at a grocery store. His parents bring in less than $2,000 through Social Security programs. He pays $100 a week in child support for a daughter who lives with her mother, and contributes to another daughter’s expenses when he can.

Shortly after Mr. McDougall lost access to Uber Eats, his family’s monthly rent on their three-bedroom apartment increased from $1,800 to $2,200.

He negotiated lower payments on his credit cards and his daughter’s mother accepted a temporary pause on his child support payments.

Delivering for two apps allowed Mr. McDougall to cherry-pick more lucrative work. With just DoorDash available to him, he needed to choose more lower-paying deliveries, putting in additional hours to reach 70 percent of the income he had previously made.

Mr. McDougall did not know what was behind the “fraudulent activity” Uber said it had found, but he had a theory.

While waiting for orders at fast food counters, he often encountered Peter Calnan, a retired Boston police officer who earns extra money delivering for apps.

A few months before Uber deactivated Mr. McDougall, the company had deactivated Mr. Calnan with an identically worded email alleging fraudulent activity. Mr. Calnan had said the only thing that was unusual about his activity was one customer: a woman who ordered from Dunkin’ multiple times a day. She always ordered coffee, sometimes with a doughnut.

Mr. McDougall also delivered frequently to the same woman, who tipped him well. “She was one of my best customers,” he said.

Drivers have a motivation to increase their order tally. Under Uber’s incentive programs, more deliveries could unlock cash bonuses or discounts on fuel or vehicle maintenance.

The customer, Nikki Forziati, confirmed that she was working from home while caring for a foster child, so she ordered from Dunkin’ “regularly.” Did Uber’s algorithms mistake her caffeine habit as a plot to collude with drivers to raise their numbers?

An Uber spokeswoman said Mr. McDougall and Mr. Calnan “were initially flagged for fraud after a pattern of unusual behavior and their access was removed. After reviewing again, we decided they’re eligible for reactivation.”

The Uber spokeswoman said that in 2022, the company overhauled its deactivation process and hired more staffers to review cases. Several reasons for deactivation, including safety issues, are always reviewed by a human eye, she said, but some deactivations are still automated. “It depends on the extent to which the issue is straightforward,” she said. She added that 99 percent of appeals are concluded within three days.

Both men have resumed delivering for Uber Eats.

Little Recourse, Plenty of Pain

The little existing research on deactivations indicates that they are surprisingly common. A 2023 survey of app drivers conducted by a coalition of labor groups found that 40 percent had been deactivated at some point. In another survey of more than 800 California drivers, two-thirds said they had faced deactivation.

Uber, Lyft and DoorDash did not provide numbers on their rates of deactivation for this story.

Organizations of ride-hail and delivery app drivers have protested what they see as haphazard deactivations. Last year, those complaints were a centerpiece of demonstrations at O’Hare Airport in Chicago and outside Uber headquarters in San Francisco.

Some state and local governments are trying to regulate deactivations. As part of a court settlement, Massachusetts mandated Lyft and Uber provide drivers a reason when they are deactivated and set up an appeals process. In 2021, Seattle passed an ordinance requiring 14 days’ notice before deactivation and establishing a Driver Resolution Center.

In most states, there is little recourse for drivers who think their deactivation was unfair. Some pay $69 for a package of services from the website Gig Rocket that guides them through challenging their deactivations, including a form letter threatening legal action and instructions on filing a suit in small claims court. Torsten Kunert, a Southern California driver who runs Gig Rocket, said he has sold more than 7,000 deactivation packages in less than three years.

The Seattle law created a set of data that a group of University of Washington researchers combed through. They found that, over a period of 19 months through January 2023, 1,420 drivers sought help for deactivation.

Eighty percent of drivers who sought help were eventually reinstated, including three-fourths of those deactivated for a suspected customer safety issue, the University of Washington study found. The median time before reactivation was 11 weeks.

Even a temporary suspension of an account can cause deep financial strain.

“Drivers that we’ve talked to have done everything from lose the lease on their car, wreck their credit to being evicted from the house or the apartment that they’re renting,” said Nicholas Weber, one of the University of Washington researchers. He noted that some drivers buy or lease vehicles for these gigs. “It’s pretty catastrophic for drivers.”

Left Without a Safety Net

In early October, Amie Campbell was locked out of her Lyft account.

Ms. Campbell, 55, who lives in Philadelphia, had a long career as a model in New York City. That career slowed as she reached middle age, and she began working in fashion and as a certified nurse assistant. Then endometriosis, an ovarian disorder, caused bouts of pain and sidelined her from any job that required a steady schedule.

In 2020, she started driving for Lyft. She provided more than 2,500 rides, had a five-star average customer rating and, in September 2024, earned $4,137 from the app.

An email from Lyft said Ms. Campbell’s account was on hold pending a “potential violation of our Terms of Service.” She sent a response, “I’m confused … you’re not even telling me what this is regarding.”

According to Ms. Campbell, a representative called her and said that a customer reported she was driving while using her phone but did not say when or how exactly she was using it.

Ms. Campbell was baffled. She said she always keeps her phone in a dash-mounted holder during rides.

“They will take the word of a stranger who wants their $8 back for a ride and deactivate my account,” she said.

Allison Guthrie, a Lyft spokeswoman, said the company, “investigates safety reports through correspondence with drivers and riders, third-party statements, route data, timing details and police reports.”

Keegan Lee was locked out of his DoorDash account last May because he failed a facial recognition test. As a safeguard against account sharing, DoorDash sporadically prompts drivers to use their phone’s camera to match their face with a previously uploaded image.

“I might have had shorter hair and the beard might have been shorter,” said Mr. Lee, 27, who lives in Baton Rouge, La.

The suspension came at a bad time. Mr. Lee had been laid off from a job selling mattresses. He negotiated his way out of a newly signed lease on an apartment and stayed at budget hotels until he found a steady paycheck.

“I’m stuck in kind of a vortex where I need money every few days so I can’t not DoorDash or Uber Eats 10 hours a day, every day,” he said.

Relying on Uber Eats, Mr. Lee’s earnings dropped from about $350 a week to $225. He borrowed money from friends and family and eventually moved in with his father.

He filed an appeal with DoorDash, uploading his driver’s license and Social Security card to prove his identity. After three months, DoorDash reinstated him.

“It’s insane and cruel to just falsely take away somebody’s ability to feed themselves under false pretense,” he said.

“The decision to deactivate Keegan was made by a human agent, not an algorithm, based on evidence suggesting potential account inauthenticity,” said Julian Crowley, a DoorDash spokesman. “During the appeal process, the evidence was found to be inaccurate, and the deactivation was overturned.”

Ms. Campbell ended up switching to driving for Uber and quickly stabilized her income. She said Uber’s prescheduled rides are easier and rarely send her into neighborhoods she considers dangerous.

But her Lyft deactivation reminded her of the precariousness and difficulty of her employment. “I’m dealing with abusive passengers sometimes and craziness going on in the car,” she said. “I have no safety, none.”