Kik Messenger hits another snag

Following a phenomenal start, Kik Messenger has been at least temporarily blocked from serving new downloads on BlackBerry devices.
The new chat application logged an impressive start with 1 million new users signed up in its first 10 days. But the BlackBerry Messenger-like service is hitting snags along the way, albeit the type of growing pains that most startups crave.
Kik’s servers went down shortly after that first benchmark and now it’s following up six days later with a new suspension, though only targeted at new BlackBerry users.
“The dizzying pace of growth has caught up with us — again. The flood of new Kik users has placed an overwhelming strain on system resources, so new downloads of Kik Messenger for BlackBerry devices have been temporarily suspended,” the company wrote on its blog. “Kik Messenger service for all existing users, including BlackBerry users, is unaffected, as are new downloads to iPhone and Android devices.”
The company did not detail why it is only closing the loop on BlackBerry devices. But it seems logical in way, since BBM users are probably the most likely to be searching for a cross-device, cross-platform alternative to the popular service that’s exclusive to BlackBerry devices.
However, there’s also a possibility that Research In Motion Ltd. sought to block the service from expanding even further among its user base.
Similar to BBM, Kik works in real-time and lets users know when one of its contacts has received a message and when it’s actively replying with a new message. BBM has plenty of other features that have earned it a legion of fans and users well beyond Kik’s current scale, but it does lack the potential scale of Kik because it’s tied only to BlackBerry devices.