Tinder has Twitter meltdown after journalist blames it for the 'dating apocalypse'

The account usually tweets out images taken from the internet — until it went into attack mode in response to a Vanity Fair article

TV personality Daniel Lue attends the Tinder Plus Launch Party in Santa Monica, California (Tommaso Boddi/Getty Images for Tinder)

Dating app Tinder has suffered a meltdown on Twitter, tweeting a string of strongly-worded responses to a journalist who criticised its dating culture.

A writer for Vanity Fair wrote a piece arguing the app was bringing about the “dating apocalypse” by damaging relationships.

In response, the official Tinder Twitter account unleashed a barrage of tweets, calling out both the author of the piece and the idea that Tinder is a hook-up app at all.

Normally a controversy-free Twitter account which mainly tweets memes stolen from the internet, it began a hours-long blast of updates that began with factual corrections and ended with an impassioned defence of Tinder’s contribution to dating culture.

The site issued a response to a claim in the article that 30 per cent of Tinder users are married.

“If you're interested in having a factual conversation, we're here,” read the first tweet, directed at the article’s author, Nancy Jo Sales.

But it soon became a run of sassy posts, attempting to take down the broader criticisms in the article, many of which gave the impression that Tinder, fittingly, had just been broken up with.

Ms Sales criticised the “Tinder generation” — what she said was a group of people looking for instant gratification and hook-ups. But Tinder responded to insist the “Tinder Generation is real”, but “not what you portray it to be”.

The site claimed it had users in China and North Korea, who had got around the bans in those countries to get access to the dating site. It also made reference to the story of a lesbian journalist in Pakistan, who used the app to get around the country's same-sex relationship ban.

In all, Tinder wrote 31 tweets.

Sales responded to the barrage, to ask whether Tinder was requiring journalists ask its permission before writing a piece about them.