The colossal audience for the finale of Stranger Things caused the streaming giant to struggle — just how popular is the final season

We’ve already covered some of the early audience numbers for season 5 of Stranger Things, now it seems the finale brought a colossal audience even Netflix struggled with.

How large is a colossal audience

It will be a few days before we get numbers from Netflix, but Deadline already reported ‘Stranger Things’ Crashes Netflix As Series Finale Debuts. They’ve been watching the numbers, and recently produced this interesting piece on the first launch of season 5 a few weeks ago — ‘Stranger Things’ Shatters Nielsen Record… with good coverage of how the numbers across all seasons come together in the Neilsen ratings to give an audience well in excess of 8 billion minutes in the first week. This is again in excess of the previous record of over 7 billion minutes, held by… Stranger Things.

As to official numbers from Netflix, they’re most recent report (Stranger Things 5 Runs Up That Hill to No. 1 in This Week’s Top 10) shows the effect of the release of episodes 5-7 around Christmas. With 34.5 million views, volume 2 of the new season made December 25 Netflix’s most-watched Christmas Day ever globally.

We can only imagine just how high the numbers will go, but fully expect the show’s final season to rocket up the all time chart and quite possibly (probably?) knock Wednesday from the top spot. We shall see.