Uber was already off to a bad start in 2017, but the year is getting worse by the day, if not the hour, for the $69 billion ride-hailing company.
In January, Uber lost more than 200,000 customers in a single weekend after the #DeleteUber movement led to a fury of account deletions by customers upset about its ties to President Donald Trump.
But that was just the beginning of Uber's no-good, very-bad month. Since then the company has been pummeled by a seemingly never-ending barrage of bad news, with a new crisis almost every day.
If business schools need a new case study for a company in a PR disaster, Uber's past two weeks are as perfect an example as can be found. And it's still not clear how Uber will get past this test.
Here's everything that's happened to Uber over the last 14 days:
SEE ALSO: Travis Kalanick is Uber's biggest asset, and now its biggest liability
Sunday February 19: The beginning
Susan Fowler starts it all with her reflections on "one very, very strange year at Uber." Fowler, a former engineer at the company, alleged in a blog post that she was sexually harassed at Uber and experienced gender bias during her time at the company. She claimed that one manager propositioned her and asked for sex, but her complaints to HR were dismissed because the manager was a high performer. She said Uber continued to ignore her complaints to HR, and then her manager threatened to fire her for reporting things to HR.
Uber CEO Travis Kalanick immediately pledges to look into Fowler's investigations, and hires former US Attorney General Eric Holder to lead the investigation. Kalanick responded within hours of publication to say Fowler's account was "abhorrent & against everything we believe in." Uber hires Eric Holder, former US attorney general, to lead an independent investigation into it.
Wednesday February 22: Cocaine and groping
The New York Times publishes a bombshell report that suggests Fowler's claims were not isolated. Employees did cocaine during a company retreat and a manager had to be fired after groping multiple women, according to the report. Former employees said they'd notified Uber's leadership, including Kalanick and CTO Thuan Pham, of the workplace harassment.
Thursday February 23: Investor betrayal and accusations of stolen technology
Uber investors, Freada and Mitch Kapor, blasted the company for failing to change. In an open letter to Uber's investors and board, the Kapors said Uber has ignored the behind-the-scenes work that some of its investors have tried to do for years to change the company culture. "We are speaking up now because we are disappointed and frustrated; we feel we have hit a dead end in trying to influence the company quietly from the inside," the Kapors wrote.
Google, another Uber investor, sued the company for intellectual property theft. In an explosive lawsuit, the Google self-driving-car group, now known as Waymo, accused Uber of using stolen technology to advance its own autonomous-car development. The suit, filed in the US District Court in San Francisco, claimed that a team of ex-Google engineers stole the company's design for the lidar laser sensor that allows self-driving cars to map the environment around them.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider