Lets be clear here- 600 requests every 1.2 seconds is 30,000 additional requests a minute. Uber is not Facebook or Twitter- the amount of requests per minute they get in a given city is probably in the hundreds, not the thousands. These were also not public API's- they were reverse engineered. That means that this puts real load on them, costs them real money in infrastructure costs, and was not done with anything even resembling permission.

A lot of people seem to say that Uber failed to communicate or were too harsh. If someone throws an order or magnitude (or more) traffic at me without telling me, without communicating with me, and using APIs that aren't supposed to be public, you're damn right I'm going to ban them. Even OP knows why they banned him, which he flat out said.

In this case it does seem like pure lack of thinking, and now that the story is out there I'm hoping someone from Uber notices and removes the ban. I'm also really hoping that Will learns a lesson here, and next time he does something like this communicate with the company before releasing anything that's going to use their resources.