Grindr and other gay apps go down after Cloudflare outage: ‘Can’t a gay boy live his life?’
Grindr is supporting a US app store age verification bill. (Piotr Swat/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Grindr is supporting a US app store age verification bill. (Piotr Swat/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Gay apps Grindr and Sniffies were two of the many platforms knocked offline due to Cloudflare’s global outage on Tuesday (18 November).
Facebook, X/Twitter, ChatGPT, Zoom, Spotify and Canva, were among the other well-known names to be affected due to a technical error.
Cloudflare, which provides network and security services to numerous high-profile websites and platforms, oversees about one-fifth of the world’s internet traffic. Users began to report issues using gay dating app Grindr at about 1pm in the UK, 8am Central, with both Android and iOS apps and web, chat function, The Grid, taps and albums all hit.
Grindr’s tech team launched an investigation and quickly identified the issues were a result of Cloudflare’s worldwide outage. Normal service returned about three hours later.
Users of popular hook-up app Sniffies reported to Downdetector – itself reportedly affected – that they were having issues at about the same time.
Users were quick to poke fun at being left high and dry by the outages. “Twitter is down, Ai is down, Grindr is down. Can’t a gay boy live his life?” wrote one user.
Twitter AND Grindr being down? pic.twitter.com/qkb6jDQQBQ
— Patch (@PatchMcScratchy) November 18, 2025
Me for the past few hours because everything was down.
— Felix #superwoke (@teapeachrose) November 18, 2025
From X, Wild Rift to Grindr
pic.twitter.com/xOZChsfSmA
Later in the afternoon, Cloudflare chief technology officer Dane Knecht apologised for the issues but said the outage was not the result of a cyber attack.
“I won’t mince words: earlier today we failed our customers and the broader internet when a problem impacted large amounts of traffic that rely on us,” he wrote on X. “The sites, businesses and organisations that rely on Cloudflare depend on us being available and I apologise for the impact we caused.
“Transparency about what happened matters, and we plan to share a breakdown with more details in a few hours. In short, a latent bug in a service underpinning our bot mitigation capability started to crash after a routine configuration change we made.
“That cascaded into a broad degradation to our network and other services. This was not an attack. That issue, [the] impact it caused and time to resolution is unacceptable. Work is already underway to make sure it does not happen again.
“The trust our customers place in us is what we value the most and we are going to do what it takes to earn that back.”
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