The arrival of thousands of athletes and their national support staff caused the gay networking app Grindr to crash a British tabloid newspaper claims.

According to The People newspaper, ‘technical experts’ said the Grindr outage was caused by athletes and others trying to logon to the service all at the same time. Grindr works by displaying the 100 guys closest to you based on GPS data. The proximity of athletes in the Olympic village means that they are very close to one another.

One user told the newspaper: “It 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.”

London is already Grinder’s most active city with around 350,000 users but there are only 14 openly gay or lesbian athletes competing in the Games of the XXX Olympiad.

A Grindr statement relating to the outage didn’t mention the Olympics at all. Company CEO Joel Simkhai said: “I want to personally ­apologise to users.

“I know it was ­frustrating. I was ­frustrated myself. I also rely on Grindr in my day-to-day personal life. It made me feel disconnected.

“Our tech team worked around the clock to solve the problems and to whip Grindr back into shape.”

The company has offered all paying users of Grindr Xtra an additional one week of usage for free.

Last year Simkhai told PinkNews.co.uk why he created the application: “As a gay man I thought: wouldn’t it be great if I could walk into any room or go to a new city and see who’s gay? Did we think it would become a business? Or that it would impact as much as it has? We had no idea.

“I think Grindr reflects real life. At the end of the day the application can only reflect its users. There are guys out there looking for love and there are those looking for sex. Often that can be the same guy, just at different times in his life or day.”