Grindr, Sniffies, and several major platforms were knocked offline after a massive global outage at Cloudflare, the company responsible for routing roughly one-fifth of the world’s internet traffic. Reports of trouble using Grindr began around 1 p.m. in the U.K., or 8 a.m. Central in the U.S. Users on both Android and iOS said chats, The Grid, taps, albums, and even the web version were unusable. Sniffies users encountered similar issues and flooded Downdetector, which was also affected with complaints.
With queer social lifelines suddenly offline, one person summed up the mood perfectly: “Twitter is down, Ai is down, Grindr is down. Can’t a gay boy live his life?” Grindr’s tech team quickly traced the disruption to Cloudflare’s system-wide failure, and service resumed within about three hours. Later, Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht apologised publicly, emphasising that it wasn’t a cyber attack. He wrote, “I won’t mince words: earlier today we failed our customers and the broader internet,” explaining that a latent bug triggered widespread crashes after a routine configuration change. Knecht promised full transparency and vowed that Cloudflare would “do what it takes to earn that back.”
