In our fragmented age, Stranger Things is one of the closest things we have to a monoculture — a pop culture item that pretty much everyone is familiar with. Even if you’re not watching the ongoing saga of Eleven and the gang’s fight so save Hawkins from the Upside Down, you’re probably aware of the basics. Heck, the show was single-handedly responsible for dusting Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” off for a chart-topping surge 37 years after its release. That’s a lot of power for a Netflix show.
A little too much power, as it turned out. Netflix dropped the final two episodes of part two early Friday morning and the streaming service briefly collapsed under the weight of millions of fans tuning into see who survived and what is left of them. Netflix managed to right the ship inside 30 minutes, but that’s a lot of bandwidth to get overloaded. It’s the the top English-language series on the service, according to Netflix itself.
It does happen. HBO Max experienced a brief crash when season two of Euphoria landed and struggled to keep up with demand for the final episode of Mare of Easttown. But Netflix is the biggest knight at the tournament, and it takes a lot to unseat it from the horse.
If you’re one of the people who logged in right at 3am EST to binge the new episodes, you actually didn’t get the final, final cut. Series masterminds the Duffer Brothers said they uploaded about 20 last-minute VFX tweaks early Friday morning. Now that is working on deadline.
