Late Friday night the California Department of Motor Vehicles walked back from an earlier memo that had appeared to require that drivers from ride-hailing services like Uber, Lyft and Sidecar carry commercial registrations. Such an interpretation would have thrown the companies into a legal gray area, with the complex process of having their drivers obtain commercial registrations potentially upending their business model.

“We jumped the gun, and we shouldn’t have,” DMV officials said in a statement, according to the LA Times. “The matter requires further review and analysis which the department is undertaking immediately.”

The initial memo, or “reminder,” as DMV officials now call it, cited an 80-year-old statute to reach its conclusion that any passenger vehicle used for the transportation of persons for hire is a commercial vehicle under the law, and must be registered commercially, even if the vehicle is only occasionally used in this manner.

Uber has roughly 50,000 drivers in the state of California. According to the San Jose Mercury News, some news outlets have reported that the DMV issued its memo in response to Uber taking some of its drivers off the road after they had registered vehicles as commercial. The DMV, for it’s part, refused to single out Uber, stating the requirement applied to “everyone.”

Even before the DMV’s official retraction, the legal status of memo was in doubt, as it appeared to contradict an earlier 2013 ruling by the California Public Utilities Commission. In that ruling, the Commission basically approved “transportation network companies,” like Uber and Lyft, that use the internet “to connect passengers with drivers using a personal vehicle.”

These ride-hailing services are not completely out of the woods yet. The law cited by the DMV is still technically on the books. In their statement Friday night, DMV officials said “there remains uncertainty” about its impact on such services.