Netflix experienced a brief but widespread outage on Thursday after releasing the first batch of episodes from the highly anticipated fifth and final season of Stranger Things.
The platform buckled under a surge of global traffic within minutes of the new season going live, leaving many viewers unable to access the episodes on their television devices.
Reports quickly spiked on monitoring platform Downdetector, which logged more than 14,000 issue submissions in the United States alone.
Users in India also faced freezing screens and connection errors, with around 200 reports recorded at the peak of the disruption.
Netflix confirmed the issue in a short statement, saying the service interruption affected only some users and was resolved within five minutes.
The company attributed the outage to the extraordinary demand generated by the show’s return.
This is not the first time Netflix has struggled to handle massive real-time traffic.
The streamer has previously gone offline during high-profile moments, including the Tyson–Paul boxing event, the 2024 Love Is Blind live reunion, and the release of the final episodes of Stranger Things season four in 2022.
Ross Duffer, who co-created the series with his brother Matt, noted on Instagram that Netflix had boosted its bandwidth capacity by 30% ahead of the premiere in an effort to avoid such a crash.
Anticipation for the series finale has been building for days.
All earlier seasons of Stranger Things climbed into Netflix’s global top-10 chart on Wednesday — a first for any title on the platform.
Set in the 1980s, Stranger Things follows the residents of the fictional town of Hawkins, Indiana, where a psychokinetic girl inadvertently opens a gateway to a dark parallel universe known as the Upside Down.
Season five, three years in production, begins with a time jump and promises what the creators describe as the “most violent death” in the show’s history.
The long-running series stars Millie Bobby Brown, Finn Wolfhard, Noah Schnapp, Caleb McLaughlin and Gaten Matarazzo, who began the project as young teenagers.
They return alongside Joe Keery, Natalia Dyer, Winona Ryder and David Harbour.
Fan favourite Sadie Sink, who joined in season two, has described filming her final scenes as an emotional experience akin to “saying goodbye to your childhood”.
The final episodes of Stranger Things are expected to drop later this week, as Netflix works to ensure its systems remain stable amid record-breaking demand.
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