Grindr Reports 'Sophisticated Cyberattack' During RNC Opening Night in Milwaukee

Pneumatic Dill

Pneumatic Dill

— 2 min read

App crashes under 'coordinated traffic surge' from 3-block radius around convention center

MILWAUKEE—Dating app Grindr experienced a complete service outage Monday evening in what company officials are calling a "highly coordinated distributed denial-of-service attack" that coincidentally occurred within minutes of the Republican National Convention's opening gavel.

"We detected approximately 47,000 simultaneous connection attempts from the Milwaukee metropolitan area, specifically concentrated in a zone between the Fiserv Forum and nearby Hyatt Regency," said Grindr CTO David Park, reading from a prepared statement. "This represents a 12,000% increase in typical Monday night activity for the region."

The company's incident report, released Tuesday morning, noted several "anomalous patterns" in the attack:

  • 93% of traffic originated from IP addresses registered to hotel WiFi networks
  • All suspicious accounts selected "Visiting" as their tribe designation
  • The attack ceased completely during prime-time speaker slots, resuming during commercial breaks
  • Every compromised profile included the phrase "here for work til Thursday"

"We cannot speculate on the motivations behind this attack," Park continued, maintaining eye contact with reporters. "We are treating this as a standard infrastructure incident."

Cybersecurity expert Jennifer Walsh analyzed the traffic patterns for Reuters.

"What's remarkable is how these 'bots' seemed to have specific age preferences, typically 18-24, and all happened to be looking for 'discrete fun,'" Walsh said. "Very sophisticated programming."

The Milwaukee Convention and Visitors Bureau reported no other apps experienced outages, though several noted unusual patterns. Uber reported "surge pricing in a perfect circle around the convention center between 11 PM and 3 AM." Local restaurant OpenTable reservations for "tables for one" increased 400%.

RNC Communications Director Michael Ahrens dismissed any connection to the convention.

"Our attendees are here to focus on family values and the future of America," Ahrens said. "I don't even know what a Grindr is. Is it an app for coffee?"

When informed of the app's purpose, Ahrens immediately ended the press conference to "attend to an urgent scheduling matter."

Grindr announced it would be implementing "enhanced infrastructure" for the duration of the convention, deploying what it called "emergency supplemental servers" to handle the "ongoing cyberattack."

"We're committed to defending against these coordinated attacks on our platform," the company said in a tweet. "We've scaled up our capacity by 50x for the Milwaukee area through Thursday. For security reasons."

At press time, similar "cyberattacks" were being reported in cities hosting the upcoming Southern Baptist Convention, CPAC, and the National Association of Evangelicals summit.

Grindr has established a "Convention Infrastructure Task Force" that monitors its servers during what it calls "high-risk political gatherings." The company maintains this is purely for cybersecurity purposes.

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