Since March, fearless partiers from high school students to LA influencers and Kardashians have been outraging the public by continuing to party — often quite lavishly — throughout the pandemic. In our technologically cursed age, it turn out there’s even an app to help those pandemic parties rage on — or there was one, anyway.
Vybe Together, an app that billed itself as a platform to organize secret parties using the tagline, “Get your rebel on. Get your party on.” has been removed from the Apple App Store, according to The Verge. The app has also had its TikTok account banned, and much of its online presence has been stripped from the internet.
The app required users to submit a profile for approval including an Instagram handle and photo evidence of the applicant partying, a Vybe Together co-founder told The Verge. Prior the crackdown, the platform had only a few thousand users, with a few thousand more requesting access after the brand began sharing videos on TikTok. According to the Verge, Vybe Together had under 1,000 Instagram followers, and the app had only 25 ratings before it was removed from the App Store. The platform managed to maintain its relatively low profile until this week, when New York Times reporter Taylor Lorenz managed to sniff it out, exposing the illicit app to her more than 200,000 Twitter followers.
“Some terrible people built a whole app for finding and promoting COVID-unsafe large, indoor house parties and they’re using TikTok to market it to millions of ppl,” Lorenz wrote in a tweet Tuesday.
According to The Verge, Vybe Together’s now-removed FAQ page acknowledged the danger of hosting and attending parties during the pandemic, and claimed the app was meant to promote “small gatherings” rather than big “parties.”
In a statement to The Verge, a spokesperson denied that the app was intended to promote unsafe behavior, arguing that it was instead designed “to help other people organize small get-togethers in parks or apartments during COVID.”
“We never hosted any large parties, and we made one over-the-top marketing video that left a wrong impression about our intentions, which has since been taken down,” the statement continued. “We do not condone large unsafe parties during a pandemic.”
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