Fans Crashed Netflix After Release Of New ‘Stranger Things’

Topline

Netflix briefly crashed overnight on Friday as the second part of Stranger Things 4 was released, according to reports on outage tracker DownDetector, a show of fans’ dedication to the popular series.

Stranger Things season four banner is seen at ‘The Lab’, Stranger Things Netflix series experience … [+] venue in Madrid, Spain on June 27th, 2022.

NurPhoto via Getty Images

Key Facts

The final episodes of the fourth season were released at 3 a.m. ET, and DownDetector reported over 12,000 Netflix outages at this time.

The number of reports drastically decreased within a half hour.

Key Background

The seven episodes of the horror sci-fi series’ most recent season was released on May 27. The fourth season of Stranger Things was delayed by the pandemic, and the show hadn’t aired new episodes since 2019. The fourth season immediately broke Netflix audience records. It became the biggest opening weekend for an English-language series on the streaming platform, garnering 286.7 million hours of viewership. It beat out the second season of Bridgerton to gain the opening weekend record and the record for the most-watched English-language series in its first 28-days on the platform. It broke Bridgerton’s record in less than three weeks.

Big Number

930.3 million. That’s how many hours Stranger Things 4 was watched in its first 28 days on Netflix, according to the streaming platform.

What To Watch For

How much this viewership count will increase. The numbers for the last two episodes—which are nearly four hours long total— will be added to the season’s audience stats.

Tangent

Squid Game, which is Netflix’s most-popular series ever, recently announced its second season is in the works, as well as a spin-off reality show. Viewers watched 1.65 billion hours of the show in its first 28 days on the site.