Disney Plus suffers technical difficulties at launch

NEW YORK (AP) — Disney’s brand-new streaming service Disney Plus may be a victim of its own success.

The $7-a-month service offering an array of Disney classics and new shows suffered some technical difficulties hours after launching at 3 a.m. E.T. on Tuesday.

The problems started a little before 7 a.m., according to downdetector.com, a website that tracks outages. It received more than 8,000 reports of difficulties, mostly with video streaming. Others reported problems logging in. The reports peaked around 9 a.m. and had dwindled by 1 p.m.

Disney said it was working to resolve the issue after consumer demand exceeded its expectations, said spokeswoman Karen Hobson. The company did not say what caused the problem.

Disney has invested billions in its streaming service, beginning with the purchase of a stake in streaming technology company BAMTech in 2016, which it later increased to a majority stake. In 2018 Disney launched ESPN Plus using technology from BAMTech. That service now has 3.5 million subscribers.

In a call with analysts on Nov. 7, CEO Bob Iger said he was confident that the technology in place could handle an influx of users.

“We feel that the platform is robust enough and that all the elements that need to be in place to manage that kind of scale are there,” he said.