Stranger Things Season 5 Premiere Briefly Knocks Netflix Offline

The premiere of the new season of Stranger Things briefly knocked Netflix’s live service offline in the early hours of Wednesday (Andorra time), with the platform down for a few minutes as the episode began. Several trade outlets reported the outage occurred at about 5 p.m. Pacific Time, when the highly anticipated fifth season was released.

The connection was inactive for roughly three minutes, and some users continued to report viewing issues afterwards. Many viewers saw an on-screen error reading, “Something went wrong. We’re sorry, we’re having trouble with your request. You’ll find plenty to explore on the home page.” A Netflix spokesperson told Variety that “some users briefly experienced a streaming issue on television devices, but the service recovered for all accounts in five minutes.”

This is not the first time Netflix has been strained by Stranger Things traffic. In July 2022 the platform was briefly unavailable after the release of the final two episodes of season four. Users have also reported interruptions during other high-traffic events on the service, including the Mike Tyson vs. Jake Paul fight, one of Netflix’s early live broadcasts.

The fifth season of Stranger Things is being released in three parts: the first part is already available, the second part will premiere on December 25, and the final instalment — a single two‑hour episode that will also be shown in cinemas — is scheduled for December 31.