Jimmy Kimmel found an unexpected target during his latest late-night monologue: Grindr. The host couldn’t resist weighing in after the gay dating app reportedly experienced an outage during the Republican convention in Dallas.
Kimmel used the reported Grindr outage to take aim at the Republican convention, noting that the same-sex dating app also experienced outages during the GOP convention in Milwaukee in 2024. He then joked about the apparent spike in activity before delivering his biggest punchline: “Trump’s the only president to bring down democracy and a gay dating app at the same time.”
“Once again, Grindr, the same-sex dating app, got so much activity during this Republican convention,” Kimmel joked. “It couldn’t handle all the traffic.”
“Grindr had outages in Dallas, just like it did at their convention in Milwaukee in 2024,” he continued. “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.”
Meanwhile, Reddit users were having their own fun with the reported outage. In a thread on r/OutOfTheLoop, one person questioned whether the connection between Grindr outages and Republican conventions was actually more urban legend than fact.
“This sounds like it is probably an urban legend,” the user wrote. “Did Grindr crash once in a city that had a Republican convention going at the same time? Does it even make sense from a technical standpoint that a bunch of people being in one location would crash a nationwide app?”
Another Reddit user argued that a concentrated surge in traffic could, in fact, cause technical problems.
“From a technical standpoint: Absolutely,” the commenter explained. “Tons of traffic from one location all attempting to access the same databases can absolutely overload it. It doesn’t have to be from the same location either, just imagine 300 people all trying to rush through a door only meant for 2 or 3. It jams up. Same thing with network traffic.”
The thread quickly filled with jokes of its own, including one commenter riffing on the “300 people” analogy with, “Black Friday riots find this to be…… true!”
In other words, Kimmel wasn’t the only one getting mileage out of Grindr’s latest reported outage.
