Snapchat's Bitmoji update was so popular it crashed its servers and sent the app down

Snapchat announced a new feature on Tuesday that allows users to create cartoon avatars of themselves to add as stickers to their snaps and chaps.

It followed Snapchat's $100 million + acquisition of the company behind the comic-style illustrations, Bitstrips, in March this year.

After the announcement, Snapchat users rushed to download the Bitmoji app, create their Mini-Me-style avatars, and hook them up to their Snapchat accounts.

And the feature proved so popular it managed to crash Snapchat's servers.

Its popularity appears to have taken Snapchat by surprise. One source close to the company told Business Insider that Snapchat is seeing more usage with Bitmoji right now than it is with the Memories feature it launched earlier this month, which allows users to save their snaps indefinitely.

This chart from Down Detector shows Snapchat suffered a brief period of outage on Wednesday morning:

Another chart from Outage.Report confirms there was an issue (different time zones explain why the outage times on the two graphs don't match):

Lots of users also complained on Twitter that they were struggling to access the Snapchat app:

A day earlier, Snapchat had acknowledged that some users were struggling to link the Bitmoji app to their Snapchat accounts.

The Snapchat Support account has not tweeted since.

Snapchat declined to comment.

Fortunately, the apparent Snapchat and Bitmoji outage didn't prevent Australian supermodel Miranda Kerr announcing her engagement to Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel using Bitmoji on Wednesday: