With the arrival of thousands of athletes and staff coming into the capital for the Olympics, it has been reported that the sheer numbers caused the gay mobile networking app, Grindr, to crash.
According to The People newspaper, ‘technical experts’ said the Grindr outage was caused by athletes and others trying to logon to the service all at the same time.
Grindr works by displaying the 100 guys closest to you based on GPS data. One
user told the newspaper: “It happened almost as soon as the teams got here.
Either loads of athletes were logging on to meet fellow Olympians or were
looking to bag a local.
London is already Grinder’s most active city with around 350,000 users but there are only 14 openly gay or lesbian athletes competing in
the Games of the XXX Olympiad.A Grindr statement relating to the outage didn’t mention the Olympics at all. Company CEO Joel Simkhai said: “I want to personally apologise to users. I know it was frustrating. I was frustrated myself. I also rely on Grindr in my day-to-day personal life. It made me feel disconnected.
“Our tech team worked around the clock to solve the problems and to whip Grindr back into shape.”
The company has offered all paying users of Grindr Xtra an additional one week of usage for free.