Disney+ cancellation page crashes as customers rush to quit

[Aeolun]

What about what he said was so controversial? It seems entirely in line with everything else I’ve seen happen on these kinds of shows.

[nerdponx]

It wasn't controversial, but this is literally the textbook Manufacturing Consent model. The small number of people in positions of power at the network are either overtly aligned with the president that he just talked bad about, or want to stay or get on the president's good side. He doesn't even need to pick up the phone or post anything on social media, they know what they need to do.

[djohnston]

I suspect they were looking for an excuse to axe and found one. It was all milquetoast, and that entire format of television is dead and the networks know they need to pivot somewhere.

[gamblor956]

The owner of the Sinclair Broadcasting group (the company that owns the ABC stations that started this) is a far-right ideologue that has been trying to drag ABC into News Nation territory for the past decade or so.

Nothing Kimmel said was controversial. It was just being used as a false flag to justify other things.

[slumpt_]

It criticized the potus, and threat of his ire is enough to scare corporations in 2025. A fairly concerning development

[autoexec]

Honestly, I thought it was way more tame than I'd expect for comedy these days, but it's also been a long time since I watched a late night talk show and traditionally the ones on the old networks tended to have much more mild and lighthearted comedy compared to the more biting/edgy stuff you'd get on cable.

[pacomerh]

nothing of what he said was controversial, Im convinced they were just waiting for the next joke to do it anyways.

[mingus88]

This is their Horst Wessel moment. It doesn’t matter what actually happened, it’s just the minimal cover to do what they always planned on doing.

Don’t believe me? Trump literally announced his plans months ago to take down these talk show hosts who were so mean to him

Poor guy :(

[belter]

https://youtu.be/7vRX-BQAjeE?t=16

[duxup]

Honestly I think most of the actually angry people only heard "about it". It was a very mild commentary.

The commentary about what Kimmel said was disconnected from what he said, hell the demand he give money seemed more like a criminal shakedown.

I think Trump's statement about going after anyone who has anything negative to say about them, that's the real goal / point. Doesn't even have anything to do with Kirk.

[myvoiceismypass]

It hurt the feelings of the "fuck your feelings" crowd, who started frothing at the mouth before even thinking about what was actually said.

[option]

Nothing. But wannabe dictator got offended

[tempodox]

He dared to ridicule uncle Donald and his gang. That’s more than enough.

[sixtyj]

And the second wave of subscription cancellations will be from people who are upset with Disney+ decision… Smart move of executive :) /s

[c420]

To those that are interpreting his comments in a certain way, the implication that Robinson is maga is highly offensive and textbook "misinformation".

Edit: there's clearly several ways to interpret what he said. I'm not making any kind of argument here, just answering op's question.

[al_borland]

He said the guy who shot Charlie Kirk was MAGA, which isn’t true, according to the information that has come out from those actually working on the case in the various press conferences, and from the evidence that’s been made public.

It wasn’t meaningful to the joke he was looking to set up, it was just misinformation for misinformation’s sake. At least it came off that way.

Add to that high emotions from people coping with a murder, and there you have it.

[leakycap]

I'm sure it's an accident and not intentional! A big corporation would never, ever do something like cause a delay so people cool off and don't bother actually canceling later.

[disney_ta_2025]

Big corporations are made of people, some who post here.

Disney's internal systems for something like this are a hodgepodge of the Hulu, D+/Bamtech, old corporate disney, and some bits sent out to SaaS. There's been multiple layers of layoffs and service ownership changes since the pandemic. I don't think the org would be able to rate limit by faking crashes if it tried.

What is happening is that routes and systems that normally have little and predictable traffic now are getting exercised... a lot harder (the exact numbers are for management to explain). Most things are going to be very resilient to this, as it's not THAT much traffic: It's still a small fraction vs resubscriptions and logins, but not everything is. Since the unsubscribe flows are never going to be anyone's top priority, this things happen.

You don't have to believe me, but I tell you it's incompetence, not malice.

[ethagnawl]

It's possible but I think Hanlon's Razor is more likely. I saw this happen myself and the form submission was successful on the second attempt. I just don't think they had the capacity to handle this surge of traffic to this endpoint/service.

[dawnerd]

Anyone that’s used any of Disneys sites know they break at random on a good day. Just look how many people complain about the DCL site having issues.

[Terr_]

I considered that, but there's a very real risk that the bad-press of it crashing will have an even bigger financial effect.

[adrr]

It would be hard to keep a secret. Someone would leak it. When i worked a for a social network, we were accused of censorship during a presidential election campaign. People were sharing and posting a clip of text in support of a candidate. It triggered the spam system which categorized it as bot spam and deleted all the posts because all the posts were identical.

[is_true]

I've used Disney+ and I think I never used the app without experiencing some kind of issue.

[arduanika]

A good webpage should not crash upon mouse over.

[rdtsc]

> A big corporation would never, ever do something like cause a delay so people cool off and don't bother actually canceling later.

They better be sure there are no disgruntled or unhappy employees and no layoffs coming up, otherwise that slack or email message will come out and it will just make things worse.

[duxup]

A website or service unable to handle traffic is still a thing in this day and age.

[ajkjk]

this is probably the case, not sarcastically

[blindriver]

Load shedding

[ir77]

just cancelled my hulu/disney bundle and requested to delete my disney account which was processed immediately and was very easy to find.

deleting the hulu account took me effort, had to search for it and log into a special site and only a submit request to yet to be processed.

so actually props to disney for not being user hostile.

[pacomerh]

Im glad people are actually following through and actually canceling, this is how you send a message.

[deeg]

I had to go through a number of "are you sure?!" pages but I was surprised at how easy it was

[vharuck]

Cancellation page worked fine for me around 11:30 EST. And here I thought I'd be late to the cancelling wave.

[stogot]

Wonder if you or others here are cancelling Apple too? For Tim Cook giving the president a gold icon and bowing before him?

[itake]

EST or EDT?

[rchaud]

I remember the HP website crashing in 2011 when they cancelled the PalmOS device line and slashed the price of the HP Touchpad tablet from $500 to $99. I had to call their 1800 number and wait 45 minutes to place my order with a sales rep. I wonder if Disney+ even has a phone number alternative to cancel with now that call centers are considered cost centers.

[catlikesshrimp]

ABC yanks Jimmy Kimmel’s show ‘indefinitely’ after threat from FCC chair (cnn.com) 629 points by VikingCoder 2 days ago | flag | hide | past | favorite | 1133 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45282482

Previous thread, with a better reference.

[stelliosk]

Even if you're not planning to cancel, if you cancel chances are you'll get an "offer" for the next few months.

[pacomerh]

and the point is not to take that offer right

[nabla9]

I hope people realize that paying for streaming is optional.

vpn is all you need to pay for.

[femto]

Better to just not view it.

Best thing for a copyright holder is if people pay for their stuff. Next best is if people consume it but don't pay for it, as that at least preserves their relevance. Worst is to be ignored and become irrelevant/forgotten.

[pleasecloselid]

Have you tried using a VPN? I installed the free ProtonVPN I got with protonmail and half the internet stops working. VPNs look like bots with high exit traffic so they are blocked. Plus countries are cracking down on exit nodes.

[soared]

What do you use with your vpn? Every since popcorn time stopped existing, I haven’t been able to find something with good ux

[jeffhollon]

Can we cancel 2025?

[keernan]

My daughter is cancelling a one week Disneyworld vacation for 4 (w+h+2children).

[khy]

All The Simpsons episodes are on my YouTube TV DVR, along with a lot of the shows my kids like (although really what they care about is a couple channels on YouTube proper), so even before this I was wondering why I was paying for Disney+ at all.

[burnt-resistor]

Can't say anything about the past or future, but it's working now:

https://auth.hbomax.com/cancel

https://secure.hulu.com/account

https://www.disneyplus.com/account

[adrr]

I wonder how much money Disney is going to lose off the cancellations for all of Disney’s streaming. Let say it’s 10%, that’s $2.4b. Linear revenue which includes cable and broadcast is only $2.7b. So even if Trump pulls their broadcast license, they’ll lose more money from this boycott not including boycotts of their movies and theme parks.

[zeroonetwothree]

It’s hard to imagine even 1% let alone 10%. Disney is too powerful a brand and when people get bored and move on to the next news cycle they will come back.

[Sanzig]

The broadcast license is also strictly speaking only necessary for over the air stations, it does not apply to cable. Cable providers get ABC for cheap due to Section 111 compulsory licensing (short version: a cable provider can retransmit an OTA station for only a small royalty), but there's nothing stopping Disney from offering ABC to cable providers for a similar cost if their license is pulled.

So, the impact at the end of the day is just lost revenue from antenna users. Cable and satellite would be unaffected. That's got to be a relatively small number in the grand scheme of things.

[luxuryballs]

“we have yet to prioritize scaling out the cancellation service”

[tibbydudeza]

I cancelled mine and I am not even in the US.

[throwaway173738]

I hope you realize the phrase “go woke go broke” is crafted to turn your brain off the same way “freedom is slavery” would.

[macintux]

Or the millions who believe the government should not be leaning on networks to shut down their critics, and the networks should not be cooperating.

[ozozozd]

Yes.

No one is upset about the free speech assault.

Nothing to see here.

/s