(Credit: Netflix)

Netflix recently experienced an unprecedentedly brief technical outage on Wednesday night as Stranger Things fans flocked to the platform in hordes in anticipation of an alternate series finale, which never really materialised.

Since the Stranger Things finale dropped on Netflix on New Year’s Eve, fans had their eyes on an alternate series finale to drop a week later, even though the series creators, the Duffer Brothers, clarified that there was no such episode on the cards.

Over 1,200 users reported Netflix outages on DownDetector right before 20.00 EST on Wednesday, January 7th, which is exactly a week after the series finale was released on the streamer.

Social media was already swarming with speculations surrounding a secret episode, with fans theorising the possibility of Conformity Gate. Following the far-and-wide mixed reviews of the original series finale, Stranger Things fans were somehow convinced that the conclusion that debuted on New Year’s Eve was nothing but a red herring for another ending that would tie up the loose ends and bring about a more satisfactory end.  

According to the Conformity Gate theory proposed by fans on TikTok, there are supposedly numerous hints sprinkled throughout the finale that suggest that another episode was to be dropped on January 7th, which would ultimately reveal that we were under Vecna’s spell throughout the extended epilogue, graduation ceremony, and everything that followed.

In essence, it would mean the original finale was a false reality, and something far more sinister awaits the fate of the Stranger Things characters. The theory that rapidly spread through multiple social media platforms was also backed up by clues within the final season episodes that fans thought and probably mistook as signifiers of an imaginary secret episode.

In the final moments of the Stranger Things finale, after everyone wraps up their last Dungeons & Dragons campaign, the show displays a closing shot of the characters’ manuals with partial lettering visible on their spines. Fans argue that the row actually reads out “XALIE,” which essentially means “Dimension X is a lie.” However, the picture suggesting the theory turned out to be doctored as the arrangement was not exactly in accordance with the one shown in the series.

Besides this, the colour of the characters’ graduation robe, an argument surrounding exit signs, the perceived stillness of Hawkins thereafter, and number seven, among other factors, have drawn massive scrutiny from fans to support various theories culminating in the possibility of an alternate finale or a secret episode.

While the Duffer Brothers had long set the record straight, Netflix also took special care to handle the situation. The platform changed its social media bios for all of its Stranger Things accounts to announce: “ALL EPISODES OF STRANGER THINGS ARE NOW PLAYING.” However, the warnings didn’t hold fans back from making their way to Netflix in numbers. But as it turns out, it’s only to be returned with disappointment.