Everyone loves to claim Grindr goes down at Republican conventions. But is it true?

This story originally appeared on Them.

Like clockwork, every time Republicans gather, the joke starts to circulate — and this time was no different.

As the Grand Old Party descended on Dallas, Texas for the 2026 Republican National Midterm Convention this week, reports circulated on social media that gay hookup app Grindr was experiencing outages, implying that the amount of user activity at the event was so overwhelming that the app must have short-circuited.

Several pundits and meme accounts circulated the supposed news on Wednesday night, including progressive YouTube creator and former Jon Ossoff digital advisor Keith Edwards, who shared a screenshot of Downdetector, a site where users are able to report that a specific website or app is experiencing outages. While Downdetector only reports outage problems when a high number of users register a malfunction, the site does not independently verify any outages, per its methodology, relying only on user reports.

But Edwards was not the only one to share the news. The supposed outage was shared by convicted fraudster and expelled former GOP congressman George Santos, as well as several meme accounts which toed the rhetorical line between saying that users reported outage — and that the news came from Grindr itself.

However, the outage never seems to have occurred, a spokesperson for Grindr confirmed to fact-checking website Lead Stories.

“While these rumors are common, the claim is false,” a spokesperson told Lead Stories. “Grindr has not experienced outages connected to the Republican National Conventions or other large events. Third party sources that often make these claims rely on unreliable data such as self-reporting, while Grindr reports outages directly on its status page.”

Grindr maintains an active status page in which users can verify user-generated reports of outages. Grindr reported no outages on the dates of the convention. Its last reported outage was on July 22.

As the saying goes, a lie can walk halfway around the world while the truth is still lacing up its shoes and, with this particular joke, it made it all the way to Jimmy Kimmel Live!, where the late-night host joked about the alleged outage, comparing it to a similar outage that allegedly occurred at the 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wis.

“Grindr had outages in Dallas, just like it did at their convention in Milwaukee in 2024,” Kimmel joked during his monologue. “And of course, there was a huge spike in Cleveland in 2016. It would seem that there is a lot of man-on-man action happening at this convention. And not just JD Vance humping Trump‘s cankle, a lot of people. It’s amazing.” Some local news outlets, such as the San Antonio Current, also reported the rumored outage as fact.

Despite Kimmel’s jokes aboutGrindr going down during the 2024 Milwaukee convention, a contemporaneous news report from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel cast doubt as to whether that narrative was real, as well.

While activity in Milwaukee might have gone up during the convention, the Journal-Sentinel confirmed that Grindr’s status page did not report outages during the 2024 RNC.

In 2016, Grindr experienced a 66% rise in usage during the RNC in Cleveland, Ohio, a spokesperson told Vice. However, there was a much larger increase — 148% — seen in Philadelphia during the Democratic National Convention, according to the same report.

Despite the widespread virality of outage claims around this latest political gathering, many people came forward to stamp out the rumor, with some people pointing out that location-specific outages are not how Grindr’s technology operates — and others calling it out for being a homophobic joke.

“This doesn’t even make sense by the way,” one user wrote in a viral post on X. “Apps don’t have a server in every city. All major apps are load balanced to handle such traffic, not that this app even receives that much.”

“I went out for Folsom Berlin last night and was quite literally shoulder to shoulder with gay men for an entire city block,” another person wrote on X. “Grindr was working fine. We simply don’t believe this is happening and it’s no longer entertaining to imagine that it is.”

“the ‘grindr crashing at the RNC’ joke is so hack and offensive,” writer Tom Smyth said on X. “but worst of all it doesn’t even make any sense like if the app can survive kylie minogue at MSG i guarantee it’s doing perfectly fine in dallas.”

As several LGBTQ+ writers have observed, insinuating that the Republican Party is run by or composed of a cabal of secret gay fascists is a homophobic joke that blames gay people for some of the worst societal ills in the modern United States.

While there are indeed many closeted gay Republicans, unfortunately, depicting a GOP gathering as the equivalent of a pop-up Carly Rae Jepsen concert isn’t the tea — or accurate. So let’s put the rumors to bed, or, at least, fact-check them next time.

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