Why did Grindr crash when Republicans traveled to Milwaukee for the RNC, and how many new users did the app see in the area?

A strange technological outage struck Milwaukee during the 2024 Republican National Convention, leaving a very specific sect of app users at a loss.

The dating app Grindr crashed, and crashed hard, while supporters of Donald Trump gathered to witness a lineup of far-right figures in mid-July, leaving users in the area facing broad blackouts. The app, which bills itself as “the world’s largest social networking app for gay, bi, trans, and queer people,” seems to have found plenty of interest among attendees — so much so, in fact, that it couldn’t keep up with demand.

Why did Grindr crash during the RNC?

The 2024 Republican National Convention kicked off on Monday, July 15, and lasted through Thursday, July 18. The event served as a pilgrimage for a number of avid Trump supporters, a huge number of whom flocked to Milwaukee, Wisconsin to attend the convention in person.

And, seemingly as a result of this influx of Republican voters to the state, by Tuesday, July 16, gay dating app Grindr was grinding to a halt. By 4pm Tuesday afternoon, more than 1,000 users had reported outages across Milwaukee, and for many the issues persisted across the entire week that the RNC was in attendance.

How many new users signed onto Grindr during the RNC?

There’s no concrete reporting on just how many fresh users flooded to Grindr during the RNC, but one user interviewed by Newsweek noted a real uptick in anonymous accounts. They noted that Grindr typically sees those looking for a “fling” create accounts with insubstantial images — often things like a torso shot with no head included — in hopes of communicating their non-committal aims.

A real surge in accounts of this kind hit the city during its influx of Republicans, with a minimum of 50 fresh accounts noted by the Newsweek source. It was likely a fair few more than that — particularly considering the source’s admission that “he stopped counting at 50 anonymous profiles” — but it seems even a few dozen more than usual can be enough to interrupt Conservative’s plans for a fun evening out.