The global premiere of Stranger Things Season 5 triggered a brief outage on Netflix on the evening of 26 November 2025 in the U.S. time zones. Thousands of viewers reported sudden service errors shortly after the first four episodes appeared. The disruption affected a significant portion of users who attempted to stream through various TV-connected devices.
Popular outage tracker Downdetector recorded about 14000 outage alerts at the peak of the incident before reports sharply declined around 8:45 p.m. Eastern Time. Many Netflix users encountered an NSEZ-403 error that displayed notifications indicating that something had gone wrong while the platform attempted to process initial streaming requests.
Netflix informed the media that the issue was brief and services recovered within 5 minutes after engineers stabilized systems quickly during the surge. The outage was short but still generated widespread attention because of the global scale of the much-anticipated premiere event and the expectation of uninterrupted access during a major franchise release.
The disruption appeared condensed among users of smart televisions, streaming boxes, and game consoles. Reports indicated fewer issues on mobile devices, like smartphones and tablets, and computer browsers. This suggests that load distribution across platforms experienced uneven stress during the simultaneous arrival of a large viewing audience.
Series co-creator Ross Duffer confirmed earlier that Netflix increased bandwidth capacity by 30 percent ahead of the season 5 premiere in anticipation of high bandwidth demand. The unexpected strain despite additional allocation highlighted the significant global interest in the new season and the challenges involved in planning for extreme peak traffic.
The incident underscores the limitations of modern streaming infrastructure. Even platforms with expansive global networks face unpredictable behavior when millions attempt instantaneous access. The situation also showed the difficulty of forecasting concurrency levels during prominent franchise events that attract synchronized viewer participation.
Incidents of streaming outages during high-profile premieres may encourage further investment in distribution optimization and network redundancy. Resilient delivery systems are important as audience preferences shift toward immediate availability during -scale launches involving heavily followed and culturally influential television shows or movies.
This is not the first time Netflix has experienced an outage. Past incidents include widely-reported disruption during the live Mike Tyson vs Jake Paul fight on 16 November 2024. The release of the final episodes of Stranger Things Season 4 in July 2022 also resulted in a server crash from overload as many users attempted to stream simultaneously.