The 2024 Republican National Convention was a veritable sausage fest, by all accounts, with Salon's Amanda Marcotte reporting in her on-site commentary, "Trump's GOP is no country for MAGA women," that mostly young men, not women, turned out to show their support for Donald Trump, JD Vance and all the other conservative big names this election year. But, according to reports from Newsweek and several other outlets, these young men were turning out for other men in a multitude of ways while visiting the Milwaukee area.
Grindr, the gay dating app launched in March 2009 — which quickly became the largest and most popular gay mobile app in the world — received outage reports from over 1,000 users in the Milwaukee area around 4 p.m. on Tuesday, according to Downdetector, a website that collects online service status information, as reported by Newsweek, with the outlet adding intel from an anonymous user who noticed way more profiles than usual.
"On any given day, you'll go on there and see a headless torso or blank profile," the man told the outlet Thursday, saying he "stopped counting at 50 anonymous profiles when he checked the app."
Former Republican Congressman George Santos weighed in on the reported Grindr outage in a video posted to social media, saying, "Grindr executives are calling the RNC convention the Grindr Superbowl."
"Let me tell you something: just come out of the closet boys. Come on, it's fun. You can be gay and conservative," he says in the video. "But look, Grindr is already outing you anyway based on the hits and guess who is in town? It's all you conservatives."
According to The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:
Grindr did not immediately respond to a request for comment about an increase in usage or reported outages during the 2024 RNC, and according to status.grindr.com, no operational incidents have been recorded by Grindr since May, when partial outages for the grid, chat and albums features were noted. In June and July, all Grindr features were 100% operational according to the app’s official status tracker.
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