• by Colin Kirkland , January 16, 2024

Three years after purchasing Drizly for $1.1 billion, Uber is shuttering its U.S.-based alcohol delivery service, with plans to strengthen its integration of alcohol delivery into its homegrown delivery service, Uber Eats.

“After three years of Drizly operating independently within the Uber family, we've decided to close the business and focus on our core Uber Eats strategy of helping consumers get almost anything — from food to groceries to alcohol — all on a single app,” Uber's Senior Vice President of Delivery Pierre-Dimitri Gore-Coty told Axios.

Since 2021, Drizy has operated independently under the Uber umbrella, maintaining its own separate app despite its offerings being integrated into the Uber Eats app.

The service never hired or contracted its own delivery workers, but instead offered local liquor stores the back-end tech they needed to provide their own deliveries to Drizly customers.

According to Axios, the shutdown of Drizly may stem from a mass cybersecurity breach in 2020, which exposed the information of about 2.5 million customers.

In an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), it was discovered that Drizly CEO James Cory Rellas had been aware of the company's security vulnerabilities since 2018 and took no action to fix them.

As a result of failing to safeguard its users' personal privacy, the FTC ordered Drizly to rid its systems of any personal data it collected and restrict the types of customer information it was allowed to collect moving forward.