After twenty-three years, The Simpsons is still too popular

EA has temporarily pulled The Simpsons: Tapped Out from the iTunes store due to overwhelming demand—and therefore, an overwhelming pressure on the game's servers.

The publisher also permanently removed the Battlefield 3: Aftershock iOS game in late February, with online support set to shut down entirely by the end of the month.

With Tapped Out, EA wants to address connectivity and lag issues present with the game and restrict the server's capacity to its current players.

While new players must wait to join in, EA promises that performance will improve for everyone soon enough:

If you've downloaded the game, you can continue to play. Actually, your experience should only improve as we work on a solution. As soon as we have resolved these issues to handle greater player capacity, we will return The Simpsons: Tapped Out to the App Store so that even more people can enjoy this “life-ruiningly fun” game.

Tapped Out is a city-building and management game for iPhone and iPad—Springfield meets SimCity.