A flood of new people logging into Grindr as Olympic Games athletes arrive in East London has led to a brief outage of the gay ‘social networking’ app as it struggles to keep up with demand.

London is the most popular city for the all-male app, with over 350,000 registered users.

A Londoner told People that the Grindr outage “happened almost as soon as the teams got here. Either loads of athletes were logging on to meet fellow Olympians or were looking to bag a local.

“The Grindr system obviously couldn’t cope. It took 24 hours for the app to get back up and running, much to the relief of all concerned.”

Grindr, which held promotions and meet-up events in London for the recent WorldPride, says all systems are now back up and running, with its founder Joel Simhai personally apologising for the disruption.

“I know it was frustrating; I was frustrated myself,” he said. “Just like many of you, I rely on Grindr in my day-to-day personal life, and not having access to it made me feel disconnected.

“One of my No. 1 priorities as Grindr’s CEO is to make sure that the app remains stable and—quite simply—that it’s working. So when we discovered that wasn’t the case, we immediately set to work fixing the screw-up. The service disruption was a challenging thing to address, but our tech team worked around the clock to solve the problems and to whip Grindr back into shape.”

Great British wit Stephen Fry is one high-profile London fan of Grindr – the photo above shows him meeting Simhai and his Grindr boys at PrideLondon this month.

Watch Aussie comedian Nath Valvo chat about Grindr on the clip below.