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