Disney+’s Quest for World Domination Thwarted by Technical Difficulties
As promised, Disney officially launched its contribution to the so-called streaming wars—officially known as Disney+—on Tuesday. But if the first hours of its existence are any indication, the service has quite a lot to learn before it embarks on world domination—starting with simply figuring out how allow users to log in. Irate subscribers began flagging the issue bright and early on Tuesday morning, making up about of a third of the complaints that greeted Disney+ in the first few hours of its life. From the sound of the rest of the complaints, though, the ability to log might be rather irrelevant at this point in time: Thousands of users have already found themselves unable to stream any of the service’s 500 movies and 7,500 TV episodes, whether via Roku or XBox or iPhone.
By around 10 a.m., Disney had tweeted an explanation: “The consumer demand for Disney+ has exceeded our high expectations.” It’s now @DisneyPlusHelp’s pinned tweet, and essentially a makeshift support center, as Twitter users flood the replies with everything they’ve been wanting to vent since customer service put them on hold. Others have gone so far as to preemptively cancel their subscriptions—and posted screenshots to prove it—while some have found a new way to turn Disney+ into a source of entertainment, trolling those in crisis with replies like “ok boomer.”
Oddly enough, Disney has been prepping for such a fiasco since 2017, when it bought BAMTech, which long worked to prevent HBO Now’s Game of Thrones-related system overload. This past September, it even launched a free Disney+ trial run across the Netherlands, where users apparently encountered problems similar to the ones they’re still having today. It might not have figured out a way to prevent those issues since, but it certainly has found an apt way to address them: via characters from Wreck-It Ralph and Ralph Breaks the Internet, which seem to be everywhere among the error messages.
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