It’s the kind of collapse you expect from a team moments before a championship match, not from the world’s biggest streaming platform hours before the final season of its most popular show.
But that’s exactly what happened.
On November 26, as millions prepared to hit play on the first volume of Stranger Things Season 5, Netflix simply… stopped working. Tens of thousands of users reported issues within minutes. Streams wouldn’t load. Servers wouldn’t connect. And for a platform that prides itself on reliability, this outage wasn’t just inconvenient, it was embarrassing.
And the timing couldn’t be worse.
This is Stranger Things, the show that became a cultural reset, that practically revived the idea of global television events in the streaming era. Netflix had months to prepare for the traffic surge. They’ve seen it happen before too, Season 4’s final two episodes in 2022 crashed the service briefly. You expect companies to learn from past failures. Instead, Netflix found itself overwhelmed again.
The outage exposes a deeper issue: the disconnect between Netflix’s ambitions and its infrastructure. The company is expanding into games, live events, interactive specials, even experimenting with physical experiences. Yet on the day of its biggest release, the simplest, most fundamental function, letting people watch a show, didn’t hold up.
As fans sat staring at error screens, the irony wrote itself: the Upside Down wasn’t taking Netflix down. Netflix was doing it all by itself.
For a service built on “press play anytime,” moments like this chip away at trust. Because audiences will always show up for something as big as Stranger Things, but they expect the platform to show up too.
And this time, it didn’t.
Everyone going to Twitter to see if Netflix crashed #StrangerThings5 pic.twitter.com/GApRd4QWPs
— iregretlikingsports (@Jimmy2424555) November 27, 2025
I was literally watching the last episode of season 4 and it crashed on me. #Netflix, y’all a bunch of assholes knowing damn well everyone was wanting to watch and knew it would crash. #StrangerThings5 pic.twitter.com/YvWzRG1Em5
— ʎpuǝM (@coolasacucumber) November 27, 2025
It crashed! #StrangerThings5 pic.twitter.com/kaSWeQWHwB
— Sergio Sanchez (@CasualReview23) November 27, 2025
NETFLIX HAS CRASHED IM CRYINGGGG OMG LET ME IN I WANNA WATCH IT #StrangerThings5 pic.twitter.com/F0VPIdU4Kt
— — lǝ | el ✪⚓️ (@kvngofmyheart) November 27, 2025
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