Was Grindr really down last night during the RNC convention? A brief investigation.Even before the RNC midterm convention started, the jokes about Grindr being down because of demand were already a thriving ecosystem on social media. But did it actually happen?
For the uninitiated, Grindr is a popular location-based LGBTQ+ dating and social networking app. At the 2024 RNC convention in Milwaukee there were reports of the app being down, and in 2016, Vice reported on an influx of new users around the convention then. Since at least that time, jokes about the app going haywire during conservative-leaning events have proliferated.
Basically, Downdetector says a lot more people than usual reported having problems with Grindr. Grindr’s own status page says there wasn’t an outage. It’s worth noting that at least some of Downdetector’s data is crowdsourced: people can report that a service isn’t working for them, and Downdetector also monitors other online sources for indications of problems. When those reports rise significantly above the normal level, Downdetector flags a potential outage. That doesn’t necessarily mean Grindr itself was down.
“It’s important to note that while we can indicate that an issue may be occurring, we don’t diagnose why the issue may be occurring or what may be happening — that is something the service experiencing the issue can only know. The same is true for how many customers are actually impacted,” Raquel Sanz, a spokesperson for DownDetector parent company Ookla, told Snopes last year.
And a lot of things can cause an app to stop working for an individual user, including local network congestion. At a large event, overloaded cell service can make a data-heavy app like Grindr slow to load or appear unavailable, even if Grindr itself isn’t experiencing an outage. It’s the old correlation is not necessarily causation thing.
In short, some users may have experienced outages during the convention. But that doesn’t necessarily mean the problem was widespread, and the jokes may have created their own sort of feedback loop, with more people checking—and reporting—Grindr problems because everyone was talking about them.
