Viewers were left unable to watch the episodes from the much-anticipated final season when the streaming platform temporarily crashed.
A still from the fifth and final season of Stranger Things. Just a day before the finale was released, all earlier seasons of the show entered Netflix’s top-10 list for the first time.
When Netflix crashed just minutes after Stranger Things season five was released, it felt like a plot twist worthy of the sci-fi show itself.
Viewers were unable to stream the opening episodes of the long-awaited final series, with many taking to social media platforms to express their disappointment.
Outage tracker Downdetector recorded more than 14,000 reports in the US, while fans in India reported the streaming service freezing and displaying connection errors, with 200 reports recorded during its peak in the country.
“Some members experienced a brief outage streaming on TV devices, but service was restored for all accounts within five minutes,” Netflix said in an email response reported by Reuters.
Netflix has previously experienced outages while hosting major events such as the Mike Tyson vs. Jake Paul boxing match in 2024 and a live reunion for the reality dating show Love Is Blind. The Netflix show also suffered a brief outage when the final two episodes of Stranger Things’ fourth season were released in 2022.
Series co-creator Ross Duffer said on his Instagram that Netflix had “increased bandwidth by 30% to avoid outages.”
A day before the series finale aired, all previous seasons of Stranger Things made it into Netflix’s top 10 shows chart, a first for any show on the streaming platform.
Stranger Things is set in the 1980s and follows the residents of a fictional small Indiana town called Hawkins, where a young girl with psychokinetic abilities opens a portal between Earth and another dimension known as the Upside Down.
The fifth season, which released its first four episodes on Wednesday, has been in the works for three years and is highly anticipated—co-creators, brothers Matt and Ross Duffer, have shared that it will feature “the most violent deaths of any season.”
The new season will also include a time jump to compensate for the speed at which the show’s stars are leaving behind the characters they play.
Millie Bobby Brown, Finn Wolfhard, Noah Schnapp, Caleb McLaughlin, and Gaten Matarazzo have led the cast of the series since its inception nearly a decade ago, when they were all young teenagers, alongside adult actors Joe Keery, Natalia Dyer, Winona Ryder, and David Harbour.
Sadie Sink joined for the second season and remained a fan favorite. She described the emotional experience of filming her final scenes as “saying goodbye to your childhood.”
The Guardian included some caveats in its positive review.
Seal wrote, “Stranger Things should definitely put down its boombox, hang up its catapults, and admit it’s too old for these capers, but it’s worth enjoying one last time.”
The show’s fifth season has a solid 86% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes, though some reviewers weren’t entirely enthusiastic.
“The cast keeps growing, but the show doesn’t get any bigger,” Sam Adams told Slate.
“It’s not just Hawkins who feels disconnected from the world. It’s Stranger Things itself, a show that’s now encased in an airless, impenetrable bubble of stagnant characters and convoluted storylines.”
“Stranger Things 5 is off to a great start,” he wrote. “A lot, a lot.”
“While very few of these four very long episodes are bad in themselves (with one major exception), too much story, too many characters, and too many complex/convoluted developments keep Volume One from being great.”
The next three episodes will be released on Christmas Day in the US and Boxing Day in the UK, with the finale coming on New Year’s Eve in the US and New Year’s Day in the UK.
