THE COMPANY behind a popular dating app for gay men has denied that the influx of athletes and tourists to London for the Olympic Games was behind a sustained disruption to service.

Grindr, an app which displays a list of nearby users based on proximity, and allowing them to exchange messages and pictures, had experienced significant downtime in its services last week.

The downtime coincided with the arrival of many of the London 2012 athletes to the UK’s capital city – prompting British paper the Daily People to claim that the arrival of the athletes had placed unprecedented demand on the service.

“It happened almost as soon as the teams got here,” its reported quoted one Londoner as saying. “Either loads of athletes were logging on to meet fellow Olympians or were looking to bag a local.”

In a corporate blog post, Grindr chief executive Joel Simkhai admitted his frustrations with the downtime, and describing the problems as “a challenging thing to address”.

“We’re confident that we got the problem under control, and we put additional measures in place to prevent this kind of disruption from happening again,” he said.

In a further statement to tech news website the Daily Dot, though, the company denied any fanciful suggestions that excessive demand from Olympians had been the cause.

“While we’d love to believe that the best-built men in the world all dressed up in Lycra and congregating in one place can generate a huge increase in Grindr traffic,” the company chuckled, “we can say with confidence that the arrival of the Olympic teams had little or no effect on our server.”

The Daily Dot also notes a recent article on ESPN’s website which claimed the mere presence of an Olympic Village itself – packed to capacity with hormonal athletes who have spent many of the last months in intense training – is enough of an aid to finding a hook-up.

In full: Our coverage of London 2012 >