Netflix has crashed for thousands of viewers after the first four episodes of Stranger Things season 5 went live for streaming. Downdetector started getting an unusual number of outage reports at around 10 minutes before 8PM Eastern time, when the episodes were scheduled to hit the service. The numbers climbed up to almost 14,000 before they went down over the next few minutes.
According to Entertainment Weekly, affected viewers were getting an NSEZ-403 error, which means their accounts couldn’t connect to Netflix. On its own interruption detector page, however, Netflix says it’s “not currently experiencing an interruption to [its] streaming service.” Those who are getting “Something went wrong” and “Sorry, we’re having trouble with your request” messages may just have to keep trying. For the NSEZ-403 error, in particular, Netflix advises switching to a different device. It’s worth nothing that the show’s creator previously said that Netflix increased its bandwidth by 30 percent to avoid a crash for the season premier, so the outage problems are hopefully temporary.
In season 5 of Stranger Things, the Hawkins gang is set to face Vecna one last time. After these first four episodes, Netflix is dropping three more on December 25 and then the finale itself on December 31.
