Bhavish Aggarwal & Ankit Bhati on Crisis Management

Ola posted its first operating profit of roughly 90 crore rupees in FY2020–21, a moment of operational break-even after a decade of cash burn. The result was overshadowed by the COVID disruption that had cut ride-hailing revenue by about 95 percent at the trough, forcing a roughly 1,400-person layoff in May 2020.

Customer bookings hit 500,000 in the first month of Ola S1 scooter availability, and the company began deliveries in December 2021 with the first hundred units in Bengaluru and Chennai. Several promised features were not enabled at launch — a software-readiness lag that drew early criticism and prompted iterative over-the-air updates through 2022.

After a March 2022 scooter fire in Pune, Ola recalled 1,441 units as a 'pre-emptive measure,' and later in 2023 offered free front-fork arm replacements on the S1 and S1 Pro after safety-defect criticism. The recall-and-fix cycle illustrated the reputational cost of moving from crowdfunding-stage prototype to mass production at scale.

In October 2024 the Central Consumer Protection Authority issued a show-cause notice to Ola Electric covering more than 10,000 unaddressed customer complaints in a year — a regulatory moment that punctured the post-IPO goodwill and forced the company to publicly commit to service-network investments.