On Monday, pop culture icon Kim Kardashian publicly apologized for breaking the iOS App Store by launching her "Kimoji" emoji app to a crush of customers that supposedly proved too great a load to bear for Apple's servers. A day later, Apple confirmed Kardashian was mistaken.
A master of social media, Kardashian told her 38.1 million Twitter followers that she "broke the App Store," or intimated as much, no less than four times on Monday. Specifically, a number of fans looking for Kimoji, an app that lets users copy and paste custom Kardashian-themed characters into messages, were having trouble finding it on the App Store.
In true new media form dozens of online outlets glommed onto the story, parroting Kardashian's tweets and adding what later proved erroneous claims.
Gossip site TMZ, for example, fanned the flames with a report claiming Kardashian's $1.99 Kimoji app at one point generated 9,000 download requests per millisecond. Without citing a source, the site said it was told Apple's tech team "swooped in and shored [the App Store] up so it didn't fully crash," a statement seemingly bolstered by a follow-up Kardashian tweet.
Apple denied the many reports and Kardashian's own claims in a statement to TechInsider, saying "there were absolutely no issues with the App Store yesterday." The company also debunked the entirety of TMZ's coverage of the day's events.
In spite of -- or more likely thanks to -- yesterday's media firestorm, Kimoji is sitting at the top of Apple's iOS App Store charts for paid iPhone apps after only one day of availability.