LOS ANGELES (REUTERS, BLOOMBERG) - The latest season of Netflix's Stranger Things (2016 to present) has pushed total viewership for the series to more than 1.15 billion hours, the streaming service said on Tuesday (July 5).

The science-fiction drama, starring Winona Ryder and Millie Bobby Brown, has become the most popular English-language series on Netflix.

The only other Netflix show to cross 1 billion viewing hours is South Korean drama Squid Game (2021).

Stranger Things also hit #1 on Netflix's Top 10 lists in 91 countries, a first for an English-language TV series, the company said.

The show's fourth season concluded with the final two episodes released on Friday, with the first seven episodes dropped on May 27.

Netflix's network went down for a brief period on Friday after a vast number of users logged on to stream the new episodes, overwhelming the service.

Some of the fans then took to Twitter to express their dismay.

"I did not just count down the seconds like it's New Years for Netflix to crash #StrangerThings," tweeted one fan showing the error message.

More than 14,000 outages were reported across the global monitoring service Downdetector at the stroke of midnight, Pacific Time, but the issue was resolved later.

The network, most known for dropping full seasons at a time, has been experimenting with releasing episodes in "volumes" to keep subscribers engaged over longer periods.