Like clockwork, all the lib shitposting accounts are going on and on with claims of this massive spike in usage of Grindr this weekend in Phoenix during Turning Point USA’s America Fest MAGA fan-con, and like clockwork it’s all based on unsubstantiated anecdotes and/or sourced from reports submitted to DownDetector – a platform that’s useful for folks to confirm it’s not just them experiencing outages of Instagram or Apple TV or whatever other platform/app.

Example from an Ookla research blog post recapping 2025 in crash-outs: “The second largest global outage stemmed from the gaming sector, with over 3.9 million reports to the PlayStation Network Downdetector page. This network-wide disruption affected users for over 24 hours, locking out players from major titles like Call of Duty and Fortnite. Downdetector’s Incident Attribution analysis concluded the cause was internal to PSN, with no major cloud or ISP involvement” that last part being key because the largest outage was Amazon Web Services in October, in third was CloudFlare last month, both of which bricked thousands of services/apps/platforms downstream of them.

Over 3.9 million reports from gamers worldwide during the February 7th outage, for which Sony gave no explanation but some fans speculated could’ve been due at least in part to high network traffic from a demo of the then-hotly-anticipated Monster Hunter Wilds, which debuted on the 28th.

A big day on DownDetector. Quantifiably bigger than Friday’s purported Grindr crash in Phoenix:

BREAKING: Grindr Is Having a SEVERE OUTAGE in Phoenix during Turning Point USA's convention pic.twitter.com/IvDh9lAHqX

— Right Wing Cope (@RightWingCope) December 19, 2025

See if you look at the graph on the right it’s like “HOLY SHIT! LMAO! THAT’S SO MANY MORE OUTAGES!” thereby confirming your priors. But don’t look that closely because then you’ll see that from a baseline of little to no reports of technical difficulties to just 168 worldwide is going to produce a spike of that scale. And that is worldwide too, not just confined to Phoenix.

Then there’s also that Sony acknowledged the crash and gave gamers five days’ free premium-level subscriptions to the network to apologize for the clusterfuck, while Grindr’s comms team is…

Well just because they used “crash out” in their tweet about AMFest (before it really started) doesn’t mean that they were seeing a spike in usage in that area. It’s just means they’re in on the “joke.”

(Note: that tweet is still up but is for some reason blocked from appearing on an outside site.)

So what’s an enterprising heterosexual blogger to do to find out if there’s a lot of dudes down to eff in the vicinity of AmFest this weekend? Download Grindr and create a profile, of course.

And then realize that the profile pic found on Google images was too boring and “small c” conservative for a happening app, so have AI make a new one befitting a fun, easygoing personality.

That’s more like it… Also tell wife that this is for informational purposes only and specify that does not encompass information on which men are available for extramarital hookups here in New York City (good practice that was established in previous forays into other questionable dating apps). This is all Phoenix, specifically in and around the venue’s ZIP code of 85004, for which Grindr has a smart feature in which one list an upcoming trip out of town to pre-plan encounters.

Goddamned 2025 gays getting such innovative UI/UX design features when Tinder in 2014 would match people on Long Island and Connecticut as though the unbridged fucking eight mile wide saltwater gap between them did not exist. “Wanna meet me at Riley’s in Stamford in an hour? I’ll bring my similarly attractive roommate, who needs some company after she broke up with her boyfriend,” said Beth, 29, “11 miles away,” on her profile. Just that. Not even a “CT” or “NY.”

ANYWAY, yes, Grindr seems great for gay men. Really no mystery why it’s so popular despite DraftKings-level hustling users for more money to increase their odds of a hookup jackpot.

As for “planning a trip” to Phoenix to see if there are any Republicans “on the DL” in from out of town this weekend? It might help to actually be gay to figure out which if any of the hashtag filters mean.

Like yeah, “Bear” is something intuitive and accessible to non-gays, but what the hell are “gooner,” “cnmn,” or “frot”? More pertinently, there was nothing like “conservative” or “MAGA” or even just “log cabin” to find out which Republican Congressmen and media personalities are on Grindr.

Now is there an overall usage spike? Who the hell knows.

Seriously. The “heat map” feature is only available in certain cities. Philadelphia, Boston, Pittsburgh, and – of course – Phoenix not among them (why they also excluded Fire Island and Provincetown is possibly even more confusing), so there is no similar glow around the convention center.

Are there more Grindr users in Phoenix than there were last weekend? Tempting as it is to conclude that this is a failure to create that frame of reference by having downloaded the app and creating the Greg Gutfeld profile last weekend, there’s no readily apparent way to simply ascertain the number of active users within a geographic radius. Grindr simply doesn’t say “167 profiles active within 5 miles right now” and paywall’s a vague “Unlock 600 profiles” for $5.99 an hour. Not worth it.

Now MAYBE would it be easier to come back with something more concrete if this had been written in a Starbucks across the street from the convention center? Yeah. But just maybe. The bottom line is that Grindr simply isn’t purpose-built for lib shitposters to grind out a compelling means of validating their priors that high-budget conservative gatherings are closeted gay male fuckfests.

You can have plenty of other priors validated by simply watching though: