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As for the premiere block, while the service is back up for a lot of users, many are still reporting suboptimal performance and lower-than-normal resolutions. It’s unclear what Netflix has already done – and is continuing to do in order to mitigate the issues; however, users should expect an easing of problems as the bottleneck of users hitting the login and play gateways begins to ease.
Users have taken to Twitter and other social media services to express their frustration over Netflix’s lack of preparedness. At 8:00 p.m. ET, the service confidently tweeted out that Volume 1 of the new season was available to watch; unfortunately, that didn’t turn out to be the case for the majority of fans attempting to load the show – and the streamer’s tweet was bombarded with memes, complaints, and even non-fans poking fun at the meltdown.
Given that Netflix enjoyed over two weeks of Stranger Things rewatch traffic, there’s no question that many fans were prepped and ready to hit the ground running – and the downtime definitely killed a bit of that enthusiasm (albeit temporarily). That said, while frustrated fans will vent on Twitter and threaten to cancel subscriptions, generally an outage like this one doesn’t have an impact on subscriptions nor does it leave a permanent stain on the series itself. It’s a brief hiccup and the only thing that can truly ruin enthusiasm for Stranger Things (or Netflix as a whole) is if the Duffer Brothers don’t end their series with a satisfying conclusion (à la Game of Thrones, How I Met Your Mother, and Dexter).
Stranger Things S5 Crashing Netflix Isn’t Even a First for the Platform
After all, this isn’t the first time that Netflix has experienced technical issues that sent fans into a frenzy – as their WWE Raw debut was marred with streaming and connectivity issues and their Love Is Blind live reunion in season 4 caused a significant delay that saw the service abandon similar live events for the reality series altogether. In both cases, die-hard fans were the ones impacted the most – and the outcomes were worse. Since both shows were live events, each series’ most dedicated followers actually missed out on watching (in the case of Raw) or were delayed nearly 3 hours (until the Love Is Blind reunion was taped and then put on-demand).
At least this time, a majority of users were able to watch shortly after the initial crash and are experiencing only minor performance issues.
