Netflix’s streaming service was temporarily inaccessible early Friday following the highly anticipated release of the final two episodes of “Stranger Things 4.”
User claims of Netflix difficulties peaked about 3 a.m. ET, when “Stranger Things 4” Volume 2 was released. Complaints about Netflix issues reached nearly 13,000 at the top of the hour, before the situation appeared to be addressed within a half hour.
Reports on the outage-tracking website Downdetector.com stated that around 15,000 outages were recorded on the website.
“Stranger Things 4” has broken the most-watched English-language series record on Netflix in its first four weeks, according to Netflix data. Season 4 Volume 2 has two episodes totaling over four hours of runtime: Episode 8 is 85 minutes long and Episode 9 is 150 minutes long.
The total number of disruptions was most likely a negligible fraction of Netflix’s 220 million subscribers. However, it demonstrates how popular and important “Stranger Things” is for Netflix at a time when the streaming service is losing members and seeing slowing revenue growth.
The most recent season of the horror sci-fi series, consisting of seven episodes, was published on May 27. Stranger Things’ fourth season was delayed due to the pandemic, and the program hadn’t shown new episodes since 2019. The fourth season quickly set new Netflix viewership records.
With 286.7 million hours of viewership, it became the greatest opening weekend for an English-language series on the streaming site. It beat out the second season of Bridgerton to set the record for the most-watched English-language series in its first 28 days on the platform. In fewer than three weeks, it broke Bridgerton’s record.
After they were unable to access the site, customers around the world turned to social media to express their outrage – and share memes with “Stranger Things 4″ ultra-villain Vecna. The site-resolved the issue within half an hour, reports said. The cast of the show could not stop gushing about how the show’s unique fandom drove the platform to approach capacity. The Stranger Things Writing Room verified the crash as well, tweeting that Netflix informed them that the release did, in fact, cause a server breakdown!”
The fourth season has already offered several plot twists and turns, as well as the show’s most sinister enemy yet: scary hell demon Vecna, played by British actor Jamie Campbell Bower. Season 4 Volume 1’s mind-bending finale revealed Vecna’s true identity was Henry Creel aka Number One, startling audiences.
