You can now stop a driver from going online without blocking their account. A restricted driver stays signed in and can still reach support and look at their past tours — they simply cannot go online until the restriction is lifted. Every restriction carries a reason, names the person who applied it, and is written into the driver’s notes.

Blocking an account signs the driver out and keeps them signed out. A restriction is the lighter measure, for the situations that come up day to day: a vehicle that does not match the account, proof-of-completion photos that keep coming back unusable, an incident that needs looking into before the driver takes more work. Those are temporary situations, and taking the driver out of the pool while keeping their support channel open is usually what resolves them fastest.

Every restriction states its reason

List Online Restriction Reasons serves the reasons you can choose from. They are the same twelve for every operation, translated into the driver’s language, and the order in the response is the order to display them in. Four of them — account compliance issue, policy violation, safety incident and “Other” — carry note_required: true and need a note of up to 250 characters alongside them; on the rest the note is yours to add or leave out.

Applying and lifting a restriction

Restrict driver from going online applies one, Lift driver online restriction lifts it again and clears the reason and note. The driver payloads from List Users and Show a user carry an online_restricted boolean for list views and an online_restriction object with the reason, note, timestamp and the ID of the user who applied it, so a driver list and a driver profile can both be rendered from what you already fetch.

Restrictions sit next to the account block rather than inside it: a driver can be restricted, blocked, or both, and the two are lifted independently. To change the reason on an active restriction, lift it and apply a new one — that way the history keeps both entries.

Work in progress is finished, not dropped

Restricting a driver acts on their work immediately. Scheduled tours they had claimed return to the claimable pool, and the driver gets the same notification they would get if a dispatcher had unclaimed them. The driver is then sent offline through the regular offlining, so your integration sees an ordinary offline event rather than a special case.

A driver who is in the middle of a tour is the exception worth knowing about. That tour is finished undisturbed — the restriction waits and takes effect the moment the tour ends, however it ends. Until then the driver cannot claim or pick up anything new, so no fresh work reaches them in the meantime.

When a restricted driver tries to go online, the request is refused with the failure code going_online_restricted and a message naming the reason, translated into the driver’s language, followed by your note exactly as you wrote it — for example “Your account has been restricted. Reason: Repeated delays. Late on six of the last ten tours.” That refusal takes precedence over anything else that would have blocked them from going online, so the driver is told about the restriction rather than about a missing capability.

The history stays readable after the fact

Each restriction and each lift writes a note on the driver, so months later it is still possible to see who restricted them, when, and why — even though lifting clears the reason from the driver’s payload. The notes are written by the platform with the system source, wording the reason in your operation’s default language, and are readable through List notes. The Notes overview covers the rest of that surface, including who gets to read them.

What comes next

Support in our own apps is on its way. In the web dashboard, your team will apply and lift restrictions from the driver’s profile and see the restricted state in the drivers list. In the driver app, a restricted driver gets a “You can’t go online” alert showing the reason together with a Contact support action.

Until those app versions have rolled out to your fleet, drivers on current versions see the app’s generic “having issues sending you online” message instead of the reason you picked, because older apps only recognise one go-online error. The restriction itself works exactly as described — it is only the explanation that does not reach the driver yet — so it is worth telling your dispatch team to expect questions from restricted drivers in the meantime.