What the London Grindr Outage Shows Us About Gay City Life

Shame on the spoilsports who have already debunked the story of London’s massive Olympic Grindr overload. This week, news came that East London had experienced a total outage of the gay dating app Grindr right when masses of athletes started arriving in the area’s Olympic Village. Londoners have since been debating who caused the surge for the app, which employs GPS to help users locate other profiles nearby. Was it athletes looking for a warm welcome, locals hoping to bag an Olympian, or bored army security personnel desperate for a break from bag search training? Or could it possibly have been all three together? This last option might have explained the loud noises coming from the Olympic Park last night, officially ascribed to opening ceremony rehearsals.

Predictably, someone from Grindr has turned up admitting there’s no implicit link between athletes arriving and their network’s failure. All the same, the story still reveals how much has changed in the way gay city dwellers use the towns they live in. It may not be the default app of choice for this year’s Olympians, but Grindr and its competitors (there are several) have shaken up gay city life in significant, interesting ways.