PLANET KIM

Did Kim Kardashian’s Emojis Really Crash the Apple Store?

An insider alleges that the reality star’s development team was to blame, not Apple.
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By Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images.

A year after Kim Kardashian “broke the Internet” with a nude magazine cover, the pop-culture empress claimed to have broken Apple’s Web site with Kimoji, the personalized emojis she launched this week.

On Monday morning, when fans encountered problems downloading 250 Kim Kardashian–themed images—including her ugly cry, a waist trainer, and her derrière from the Paper magazine shoot—the reality star took to Twitter to claim that demand for her Kimojis was so great that it crashed Apple’s app site. In the span of three minutes, the mother to North and Saint fired off a flurry of apologetic tweets vacuum-sealed in self-congratulation and hype.

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Taking Kardashian’s tweets as fact, the New York Post declared, “Kim’s butt strikes again, this time breaking Apple’s App Store.” Entertainment Tonight gushed, “Kim Kardashian’s Kimoji App Breaks Apple Store After Insane Amount of Downloads.” And TMZ reported that the app was getting up to “9,000 downloads per millisecond,” which sounded like a completely fictional exaggeration, until Apple seemingly confirmed it as such, according to Tech Insider.

On Tuesday, a source with knowledge of the store’s operations confirmed to VF Hollywood that there were no outages on the app store on Monday, which means the Kimoji malfunction was not at all related to Apple’s capabilities. In addition to having trouble downloading Kimoji, fans also experienced difficulties inserting the emojis into text messages—which, some might argue, is the only real purpose of an emoji—and using them on Facebook. While Kardashian did vaguely acknowledge that there were other issues with her latest cartoon-ish contribution to society, she continued to lead fans to believe that the fault was with Apple.

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After speaking with Apple, Tech Insider breaks down what more than likely happened during Monday’s Kimoji krash.

The truth is, people were probably having issues finding the Kimoji app on the App Store because it takes time for Apple to properly index new applications for search. So unless you had a direct link to the app in the App Store, you wouldn't have been able to find it with a simple search. It’s possible Apple prioritized indexing the app to ensure more people could find it by late Monday afternoon, but in no way did Kimoji “break” the App Store for any period of time.

If you need further confirmation, look on Apple’s site to see that there were no outages on Monday for any reason. Now if only Kim Kardashian could expand her empire with a fact-checker . . .