Did Olympic Athletes Cause Massive Grindr Crash in London?

The British tabloid paper the Sun reported this week that Grindr had a meltdown and crashed as soon as athletes arrived in East London for the Olympic Games, which start on Friday. But the Atlantic Wire points out that may not be the case.

Grindr is a phone app that allows gay men to hook up -- or chat -- with other gay men in the area, (but mostly hook up).

The Sun claims that experts on the mobile app believe Grindr crashed because of a surge of usage, which happened to coincide with the arrival of Olympic athletes.

"It happened almost as soon as the teams got here," a Grindr user told the Sun. "Either loads of athletes were logging on to meet fellow Olympians or were looking to bag a local."

It was reported that Grindr was down for 24 hours.

A statement from officials of Grindr read: "We apologise for the inconvenience and would like to thank you for being the best community around. You're the best."

Joel Simkahi, the application's founder, also made a statement about the issue.

"I want to personally apologize to users," Simkahi said. "I know it was frustrating. I was frustrated myself. I also rely on Grindr in my day-to-day personal life. It made me feel disconnected. Our tech team worked around the clock to solve the problems and to whip Grindr back into shape."

But the Atlantic Wire reports that Grindr's glitch wasn't caused by several gay sports stars looking for a quickie. Someone from the company emailed the publication and wrote: "While we'd love to believe that the best-built men in the world all dressed up in Lycra and congregating in one place can generate a huge increase in Grindr traffic, we can say with confidence that the arrival of the Olympic teams had little or no effect on our server. The truth is that there are many factors that cause a technological service disruption."

Supporting the assertion that the Grindr malfunction wasn't caused by massive Olympic team usage was the recently reported fact that there are only 10 openly gay athletes that will compete in the sporting event, which include Australian diver Matthew Mitcham, Dutch equestrian Edward Gal and U.S. soccer player Megan Rapinoe and more.

On the other hand, there is widespread speculation that at least a few athletes aren't comfortable with coming out, especially from nations that aren't protective of gay citizens. According to Outsports, there are over 100 identifiably gay Olympians.