Arrival Of London Olympians Crashes Gay Dating App Grindr

Let the games begin. Within minutes of the first Olympic athletes arriving in London for the summer games, Grindr – a geolocation-based dating app primarily geared towards gay men — crashed due to an onslaught of unprecedented demand. Technicians believe that the arrival of the Olympians created a wave of new customers signing up for the service that caused the servers to grind to a halt.

Grindr was launched in 2009 and now boasts over 4 million users worldwide, but London is the most popular city for the app, boasting 350,000 Grindr users. Grindr gears itself primarily towards gay  men looking for potential partners in their area sorted by proximity. The app works in a similar fashion to the controversial Girls Around Me app except users volunteer to share their location information.

Addressing concerns about the outage, Grindr CEO, Joel Simkhai, released the following statement on the company’s blog:

I want to take a minute to personally apologize for the service disruptions that you experienced during the past few days. I know it was frustrating; I was frustrated myself. Just like many of you, I rely on Grindr in my day-to-day personal life, and not having access to it made me feel disconnected.

We’re confident that we got the problem under control, and we put additional measures in place to prevent this kind of disruption from happening again. And in order to bring the app to a higher level of stability and quality, we look forward to releasing the new Grindr later this summer. It’ll be a revolutionary new improvement in every way, and we’re really excited about it.

Grindr’s service has been restored as of Monday morning.

• Source People UK

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