You’ll never guess what Charlie Kirk’s memorial service reportedly did to Grindr’s server…
Grindr outages were reported yesterday near Phoenix as Charlie Kirk fans penetrated the area.
Mark
Charlie Kirk’s five-hour memorial service at State Farm Stadium in a suburb of Phoenix, Arizona featured pyrotechnics, a cribbed speech from Joseph Goebbels and tens of thousands of mourners wearing red, white and blue.
The proceedings also apparently created heavy traffic on the grid… like most major GOP events.
A severe Grindr outage was reported Sunday in the Phoenix area, according to a service called Downdetector. On the surface, the anecdote seems fake, considering it’s one of the most obvious jokes imaginable. But further examination indicates the tidbit is legit.
Downdetector pledges to ensure that incidents are “correctly represented.” Its methodology page says the following:
How about we take this to the next level?
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“To make sure that incidents are correctly represented, Downdetector calculates a baseline volume of typical problem reports for each service monitored, based on the average number of reports for that given time of day, measured over the previous year. Downdetector only reports an incident when the number of problem reports is significantly higher than the baseline.”
With an established base line, Downdetector tries to safeguard itself from pranks or hoaxes. Other large-scale outages were reported in metros across the Midwest and East Coast, including Chicago, New York and Washington D.C.
But a look at the map shows the biggest red bubble is in Phoenix, where 200,000 MAGA heads and every member of the presidential cabinet turned out for Kirk’s arena-sized service.
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The curious correlation between big Republican events and Grindr outages is well established. Last year, there were over 1,000 reports of the hookup app crashing in Milwaukee near the RNC. A user told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel he noticed a proliferation of blank profiles on his grid when the convention began and Christian conservatives penetrated the city.
“The Grindr user said on a normal day you’d encounter maybe 10 users with no profile photo,” the article says, “but Thursday, when he checked the app, he said he stopped counting at 50 blank profile photos.”
After the 2016 RNC in Cleveland–where Tr*mp accepted the nomination for the first time–Vice cited Grindr sources who said the area around the convention center saw a 66% bump in traffic. Other hot spots, such as Times Square and South Beach, didn’t experience a comparable surge.
While Grindr doesn’t say there were any reported issues Sunday, we’re not sure if we take the company’s word as gospel. Despite the app’s glitchy reputation, Grindr seldom reports outages on its website, only logging five over the last two months.
Of course, it’s possible there were loads of false reports Sunday. When it comes to LGBTQ+ people, Kirk certainly breeded contempt.
He spoke out vociferously against gay rights, deriding queer activists as members of the “alphabet mafia” and claiming proponents of same-sex marriage want to “corrupt” people’s children.
The 31-year-old Turning Point USA Founder saved his harshest words for transgender people. He suggested trans people should be “taken care of the way we used to take care of things in the 1950s and ‘60s,” while calling for doctors who provide gender-affirming care to be imprisoned and face “Nuremberg-style trials.”
Perhaps most contentiously, Kirk referenced a passage from Leviticus about stoning gay people, though his supporters argue he was pointing out the follies in cherrypicking Bible versus.
There was no debating his feelings on Lia Thomas, the trans college swimmer who won an NCAA championship. Kirk called for fathers of other swimmers to descend from the stands and form a line in front of Thomas to physically block her from the pool. ‘Hey, tough guy, you want to get in the pool? Cause you’re gonna have to come through us,'” Kirk imagined the fathers saying to the college athlete.
Given Kirk’s emphasis on chauvinistic values–he advised Taylor Swift to “submit” to Travis Kelce upon their engagement–there’s no way any of his God-fearing fans would ever mourn their sorrows while scrolling the orange demon app. And no antigay GOP politicians have ever been caught surreptitiously cavorting with other men. That would be hypocritical!
And Republicans, who celebrate Kirk as a champion of free speech while using his tragic passing as an excuse to suppress the First Amendment, would never be hypocritical.
Right?!
If you believe that, we have a headless torso to show you…
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