We've actually had this conversation before. It sounds ridiculous, but the story is actually a little different: OKWS was built prior to OKCupid, and they inherited it. See http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/~max/docs/okws.pdf.
I could swear I remember, back when they were TheSpark, them claiming that the TheSpark ran on a custom webserver written in C++. That would be consistent with the idea that OKWS was done as Max's Harvard thesis project and then inherited by TheSpark and OKCupid later.
There are a variety of reasons why startup founders may want to bend the truth with their public statements.
