“New pizza index?”

Thousands gathered at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, for a memorial service for Charlie Kirk on Sunday, Sept. 21. Many attendees wore “I am Charlie Kirk” shirts, MAGA hats, and carried American flags.

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The occasion featured his widow, Erika Kirk, just lately named CEO of Turning Point USA, in addition to appearances from President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and different GOP leaders.

Although Grindr’s official standing web page listed no points on Sept. 21, social media customers in Phoenix—about 9 miles from the stadium—stated they’d bother utilizing the app. The crowdsourced tracker Downdetector.com mirrored spikes in user-submitted experiences shortly after 7 pm and once more round 8 am the next day.

Of course, Downdetector visualizes user-submitted drawback experiences; it doesn’t independently confirm outages, which means anybody can report points with any app or web site for any purpose.

This hasn’t stopped the jokes throughout social media, nevertheless, as customers speculated the timing was linked to the inflow of Republican attendees and japed a couple of surge of app visitors close to the stadium.

Downdetector experiences spiked the day of the memorial

Correlation isn’t causation: Downdetector additionally confirmed spikes in different main cities, together with Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York.

However, comparable slowdowns appeared throughout previous GOP gatherings, together with the 2024 Republican National Convention, the place Grindr struggled with concentrated visitors in host cities. This consistency fueled hypothesis that many attendees had been energetic on the platform.

According to Vice, the 2016 RNC in Cleveland noticed Grindr consumer visitors enhance by 66%.

Nevertheless, Grindr didn’t acknowledge the problem. Its most up-to-date listed drawback occurred on Sept. 12, 2025, effectively earlier than the memorial.

On X and TikTok, many individuals identified the irony of a Grindr slowdown throughout a celebration of a right-wing determine. 

@hopeisforpeople Replying to @rae.rae.purple You can’t make these things up lol #charliekirk #phoenix #arizona #statefarmstadium #fyp ♬ authentic sound – VC

Others leaned into hypothesis about hypocrisy, with some feedback asserting {that a} native spike would point out that Republican males use the app.

“Republicans crashing grindr while supposedly at their good friend’s memorial service would seem to undercut the message that it was about christ,” wrote @BeigeFrequency.

One consumer tweeted, “You sure can tell when both MAGA and the Christian hard-right are in town at the same time. The Grindr app goes crazy, double or more the use of both San Francisco and LA put together.”

Another X consumer joked, “It’s the GOP convention all over again.”

On the r/lgbt subreddit, customers had the identical concept. “Grindr should start tracking and increase service to the areas of RNC gatherings,” joked u/LogJumpy94.

“New pizza index?” added u/AlliAioli.

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