Reports Of Mass Grindr Outages Near Charlie Kirk Memorial Service
Image: RightWingCope/X
The internet has been aflame with mirth after reports of mass Grindr server outages were timed a little too well with the flood of conservatives attending the Charlie Kirk memorial service.
Tens of thousands of people gathered in Arizona on Sunday for a memorial service honouring Charlie Kirk, conservative pundit who was fatally shot at a speaking event held at Utah Valley University two weeks ago.
Photographs of the event show a sea of red, white and blue, with plenty of Make America Great Again hats and other Trump-branded memorabilia. The BBC said the memorial resembled “a raucous political rally or megachurch service”, with Christian bands leading the audience in song and prayer before proceedings began.
So imagine everyone’s surprise when users in Phoenix, less than ten miles away from the stadium the event was held in, began to report difficulties using the app.
Grindr didn’t make any official reports of outages, but crowdsourced tracker Downdetector showed huge spikes in reported server outages, with people inevitably linking the crash to the thousands upon thousands of conservatives in very close proximity.
How legit is this??
Downdetector does run on user-submitted reports, meaning anyone can report an issue for whatever reason, but the website has accounted for such behaviour, calculating a “baseline volume of typical problem reports for each service monitored, based on the average number of reports for that given time of day, measured over the previous year.”
One TikTok showed an alleged screenshot from the hookup app Sniffies, with anonymised users all appearing to congregate around the stadium.
@hopeisforpeople Replying to @rae.rae.red You can’t make this stuff up lol #charliekirk #phoenix #arizona #statefarmstadium #fyp ♬ original sound – VC
Downdetector reported similar spikes in other major cities such as Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York, and while we cannot go on record and say Kirk-fanboys were cruising in between bouts of mourning their new martyr, the evidence is pretty persuasive.
It wouldn’t be the first time reports like this have appeared. During the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee last year, Grindr was reported to be experiencing heavy crashes, accompanied by a sudden increase in anonymous users looking for quick hookups or flings.
At the 2016 RNC, Grindr told Vice that there were “more than a thousand guys [using] the app near the Quicken Loans Arena” where the event was being held, a rise of 66 per cent.
“When comparing Quicken Loans visitors to the Grindr community at large, the biggest trend is over-representation of white males,” Grindr said. “White men comprise only 40 percent of the Grindr community, but represent 75 percent of the visitors [at the RNC].”
Kirk would be delighted to know that those who mourn him are living in accordance with the values he espoused, which included his opposition of gay marriage, a belief in the “LGBTQ agenda”, and his firm stance that there are “only two genders”.
