With the explosion of the platform economy, there has been a growing interest in the phenomenon of platform work. Yet, although platform work is a global phenomenon, few studies have examined how these contexts shape how the work is accomplished by individuals and how this affects platforms organizations being reliable. This article fills this gap by examining the lived experiences of platform workers in the largest sector of the on-demand economy, the ride-hailing industry, in several countries in the Global South: Brazil, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa. Our multi-layered data includes participant observation, interviews (n=181), and archival data from online driver communities. While ride-hailing companies purport their work to be equally accessible across the globe, our research describes how individuals in these largely informal economies face challenges because of resource availability and the platform’s incomplete technical closure. Faced with these challenges, workers create a system of three bottom up reliability practices–entry work, closure work, and security work– of varying cost and efficacy. Largely invisible to the platform company, these reliability practices allow platform companies to provide reliable services while workers’ efforts are invisible with individuals bearing the economic and physical precarity associated with these practices.