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by GoPride.com News Staff

London — Despite salacious headlines and claims by a number of British tabloids that the arrival of thousands of Olympic athletes caused Grindr to crash, it appears statistically unlikely that horny athletes actually broke the popular all-male hook-up app.

Under the July 21 headline, "Grindr to a halt: Gay dating website crashes due to overuse within minutes of Olympic athletes arriving in London," The Mirror cited "technicians" who believed the influx of Olympians from across the world on Monday, July 16, sparked a flood of new customers causing the loss of the service in East London.

Once the story was posted by one British tabloid, it was picked up by the remaining sensationalist tabloids and spread quickly on the Internet.

On Thursday, Grindr CEO Joel Simkhai apologized on the site's blog, "I want to take a minute to personally apologize for the service disruptions that you experienced during the past few days. I know it was frustrating; I was frustrated myself."

It remains unclear what actually caused the Grindr outage in England, but statistically speaking it's more likely the thousands of arriving tourists are to blame, not the athletes.

According to Outsports.com, there are only 20 openly gay and lesbian athletes out of a total of 12,602 participating at the London 2012 Olympics and Paralympics. That means far less than 1% of the athletes are openly LGBT.

London, which is the most popular city for Grindr, was not alone in service interruptions. Technical problems plagued Grinder last week with frustrated users in the United States - including Chicago - also reporting trouble. 

One Chicagoan told GoPride.com that Grindr sent notice of server upgrades via the in-app messaging system.

Grindr launched in 2009 and claims to have four millions customers worldwide. 

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