Netflix suffered a brief outage as the fifth and final season of Stranger Things went live, with tens of thousands of users reporting problems accessing the service around the moment the first four episodes dropped.
Outage tracker Downdetector logged more than 14,000 incident reports at the peak on Wednesday night US time, with viewers in markets including the US and India facing error messages and being unable to start the new episodes.
Netflix said the disruption was limited mainly to TV devices and that streaming was restored for all accounts within about five minutes, although elevated error reports continued for a short period as users retried the service.
The streamer had increased capacity ahead of the launch, with the show’s creators saying bandwidth had been boosted by around 30% to cope with demand. Even so, the spike in traffic was enough to trigger a short-lived crash as fans rushed to watch the first batch of episodes.
It is not the first time Stranger Things has overwhelmed Netflix’s infrastructure. When season four, volume two was released in July 2022, the platform also experienced a brief global outage, with around 13,000–14,000 user reports logged before service quickly stabilised.
