The last two episodes of the fourth season drew a little too much viewership.
Early this morning, Netflix released the final two episodes of the fourth season of Stranger Things. While this second “volume” of the season is only two episodes long, both episodes are movie-length, and considering the cliffhanger the first volume left off on, people have been all too eager to watch them in full. In fact, on the episodes’ release, they may have been a bit too eager.
According to Downdetector.com, at approximately 3:00 AM Eastern time, not long after the new episodes dropped on Netflix, there was a sudden spike of outage reports, peaking at around 13,000. It’s pretty obvious what happened: so many people tried to log on at the same time to watch the new episodes, that Netflix buckled under the pressure. Luckily, this outage was short-lived, being remedied in about thirty minutes’ time.
In the brief time the service was down, though, early-morning viewers took to Twitter to voice their frustrations, as well as post memes of the season’s new villain, Vecna, blaming him for the outage.
https://twitter.com/heizdu/status/1542767542028369920
vecna laughing at us bc netflix crashed #StrangerThings #Netflix pic.twitter.com/a3WbOPDFtY
— delgado (@4ng3La_) July 1, 2022
When the first volume of the fourth season of Stranger Things first released earlier in June, it swiftly became the highest-rated English-language series on the service, reigniting the the fan passion for one of Netflix’s first big hits, not to mention reinvigorating it after the slightly more lukewarm reception of seasons 2 and 3.