As tens of thousands of supporters arrived at a Sept. 21, 2025, memorial service in Arizona for Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist who was fatally shot at a Utah university 11 days earlier, social media users spread a rumor that the popular gay dating app Grindr experienced outages nearby.
The claim spread on X, Facebook and Reddit. Many posts included screenshots appearing to show a spike in Grindr outage reports on the day of the memorial, as well as a heat map with outage reports focused in Phoenix, less than 20 miles from Glendale, the site of Kirk's service. The screenshots appeared to come from Downdetector, an online platform providing real-time information on outage reports across various websites and services.
Adding to the confusion, X's artificial intelligence chatbot, Grok, provided conflicting responses to social media users asking about the legitimacy of the data.
Downdetector's website publishes data for only the past 24 hours, meaning that as of this writing, information for Grindr outages on Sept. 21 was no longer available and could not be verified. Popular webpage archive sites did not have a copy of Downdetector's webpage on Sept. 21.
In response to a request to verify these reports, Ookla, the company that runs Downdetector, suggested we reach out to Grindr. Given that Ookla did not provide confirmation that the screenshots represented actual real-time information from Downdetector, we have not rated this claim.
"It's important to note that while we can indicate that an issue may be occurring, we don't diagnose why the issue may be occurring or what may be happening — that is something the service experiencing the issue can only know. The same is true for how many customers are actually impacted," said Raquel Sanz, a spokesperson for Ookla, via email.
Grindr itself did not officially report any outage on Sept. 21.
"As noted on Grindr's status page, there were no outage reports on September 21," a spokesperson for the company said via email in response to an inquiry about whether an outage or increased user traffic happened in Glendale during Kirk's service.
Screenshots of the Downdetector page on Sept. 21 circulating online did not appear to be fabricated, given that multiple users posted varying images of the same or similar information. For example, in one user's screenshot of the graph showing the "past 24 hours," the X axis on the graph went from 8 p.m. to 4 p.m., whereas in another screenshot, the chart showed labels for 9 p.m. to 5 p.m., indicating users either took screenshots of legitimate data from different time zones or at slightly different times. (For reference, the Kirk memorial reportedly began around 11 a.m. Pacific time and lasted approximately five hours, based on live streams of the service.)
Downdetector collects status information from problem reports submitted directly on its website, social media and "other key indicators from across the web," according to its methodology page. The website calculates a "baseline volume of typical problem reports for each service" and then compares it with real-time data to determine whether an incident has actually happened. According to the screenshots posted online, Downdetector collected 168 problem reports during the largest spike on Sept. 21, as opposed to the usual baseline of about two reports.
Data from Sept. 22 suggested Grindr users were still experiencing issues with the app; Downdetector reported 127 problem submissions on Sept. 22 at 10:56 a.m. Pacific time. Downdetector's live heat map, as of Sept. 22, showed reports coming from or around multiple major U.S. cities, including Phoenix.
Grindr outage map on Sept. 22, 2025. (Downdetector)
Grindr outage reports heat map, Sept. 22, 2025. (Downdetector)
Snopes has previously reported on satirical claims that Kirk accidentally revealed he had Grindr on his phone while complaining about the "gay agenda" and that a Grindr executive called the Republican National Convention the dating app's "Super Bowl."