The launch of the first four episodes of the fifth and final season of its smash hit supernatural drama series “Stranger Things” proved too much even for Netflix.
New episodes launched on the service at 5pm PT last night, and within minutes, fans flooded social media complaining that Netflix had crashed.
The outage was short-lived as service was seemingly back up and running within a few minutes, and the official account retweeted a user comment that said: “STRANGER THINGS IS BACK EVERYONE STFU”
Netflix said in a statement to THR following the crash: “Some members briefly experienced an issue streaming on TV devices, but service recovered for all accounts within five minutes.”
Co-creator Ross Duffer revealed that Netflix increased bandwidth by 30% to avoid a crash. Turns out it wasn’t quite enough.
The new run has received the worst reviews of the series thus far on Rotten Tomatoes at 88% and second worst on Metacritic at 71/100, but in both cases, the scores are so close to the last two seasons that the difference is negligible.
The remaining four episodes air in two blocks, with three more on Christmas Day and the finale on New Year’s Eve.
