Three years after it bought the alcohol delivery service for $1.1 billion, Uber has decided to shut down Drizly.
Drizly announced it was closing on its social media accounts, quoting the popular phrase “all good things must come to an end.”
The Boston-based company, seen as a lifeline for libations during the pandemic era, will have its last call at the end of March.
Starting in 2012, Drizly provided beer, wine and liquor deliveries to customers of legal drinking age through its mobile app across 26 U.S. states and over 1,400 cities.
According to the company’s website, the idea for the business started as a text from one friend to another: “Why can't you get alcohol delivered?"
Alcohol delivery boomed early in the pandemic as consumers tried to limit trips to the store. According to NielsenIQ, U.S. alcohol online sales jumped 553% in April of 2020.
That’s when Uber took notice.
Drizly became a wholly owned subsidiary of Uber after the companies reached a deal in 2021. Drizly’s marketplace was integrated with the Uber Eats app, while also keeping a separate Drizly app.
Axios, one of the first to report on the closure, said an issue of cybersecurity might be a big reason why Uber made the decision to end Drizly.
In 2020, Drizly confirmed that a hack exposed information of approximately 2.5 million of its customers. The Federal Trade Commission later said Drizly knew about its security flaw two years before the breach and it didn’t fix it, resulting in an order that restricted the types of customer information Drizly could collect and retain.
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