Disney+ was always going to be very popular streaming service at launch, but it seems to be proving too popular for Disney's servers right now.
As The Verge reports, there's a good chance that after signing up for the service, you'll see an "unable to connect" error pop up on screen rather than the episode of Marvel's Hero Project or The Mandalorian you were expecting to watch.
Here at PCMag, we got errors on Xbox, iPhone, and Android. "Sorry something went wrong. Please try again later," read one message. "The requested media is not available," said another.
As of 10 a.m. ET, Downdetector.com was showing Disney+ outages in large portions of the East Coast, as well as spots in other areas of the US and the Netherlands.
Disney Streaming Services monitors Disney+ 24 hours a day and attempted to prepare for the US launch by running a test in The Netherlands, The Verge notes. Although that test went well, it clearly didn't prepare Disney for the volume of Americans logging in early on launch day.
The other problem Disney has is the demand it is currently dealing with is only going to get worse as the day goes on. It will most likely peak this evening when everyone gets home from work.
So far, the Disney+ and Disney Streaming Services Twitter accounts haven't mentioned the connection errors, but you can guarantee Disney has every available engineer working to resolve them in time for the evening spike in demand. The subscription support team is also going to be extremely busy today.
The last thing Disney wants is headlines tomorrow about a disastrous Disney+ launch, and it's not like the company is new to this streaming game. Hopefully the problems get identified and resolved within the next few hours.
Disclosure: Downdetector is owned by Ookla, which is owned by PCMag parent company Ziff Davis.