from the adjust-your-tinfoil-anntenae dept

A Non-Existent ‘Stranger Things’ Secret Episode Briefly Broke Netflix

The story of Netflix these past several years has been a fairly consistent one, told primarily across a few main pillars. The company has begun hitting subscriber adoption issues as it raised prices, raised them some more, and then raised them even further, all as the company attempts to gobble up more live content, largely sports streaming, all while experiencing occasional service failures with the backend not being able to keep up with the usership. It’s a strange confluence of events, with Netflix clearly attempting to build up more content, particularly live content, all while not having enough beef behind the platform to support peak usage despite consistently raising prices.

But it’s one thing to occasionally experience usage disruption in the middle of a massive live event, such as the Mike Tyson fight from a few months ago. It’s an entirely new level of embarrassing when content that doesn’t exist causes service disruption, as just happened briefly this past week.

If you have no idea what “Conformity Gate” is, I’m both jealous and curious how you ducked it. Netflix recently aired the series finale of Stranger Things. It got mixed reviews, but a very vocal crowd had major problems with it and explained it all away with the idea that it was a fake ending (I won’t go into details, it’s all out there for you to find if you like) and that a secret new ending episode would be dropped on January 7th. While Netflix was mostly silent on this theory that exploded throughout social media and the internet, the show’s stars and creators were fairly vocal about how the theory wasn’t true. Enough people didn’t belive them, however, such that on January 7th the platform briefly had trouble keeping up with the number of people attempting to log in and find this non-existent episode.

Netflix experienced a service disruption on January 7, 2026, at around 8 p.m. ET, which coincided with the time fans anticipated a secret ninth episode of Stranger Things 5 dubbed “Conformity Gate.”

The theory, widely circulated on platforms like TikTok and Reddit, falsely claimed that the finale released on December 31 was a decoy and that a real ending would be revealed in a surprise episode. “Netflix crashed after many fans thought a secret final episode of ‘Stranger Things’ was dropping tonight,” posted Culture Crave on X (formerly Twitter). Pop Base confirmed, “Netflix crashed as ‘Stranger Things’ fans anticipated a secret ninth episode of the final season. Nothing dropped.”

Again, we have a confluence of failures here that all contributed to this. Netflix clearly didn’t invest enough of its price-hike money into its platform to be able to handle peak load generally for situations like this. The platform also didn’t do nearly enough to temper the public’s expectations as speculation and this Conformity Gate conspiracy theory ran wild. Netflix did finally put some messaging out with a vague confirmation that all of the series episodes were currently live for streaming. That obviously wasn’t enough.

Was this a huge deal? Probably not. Was it a prolonged outage? Not really. But it’s an event that exposed where Netflix has placed its priorities when it comes to its streaming platform and how it has spent the millions of extra dollars it has raked in through price hike after price hike.

And if the company really wants to expand into more and more live streaming events, it’s not a great sign that a non-event could crash the platform like this.