Disney Plus now has 100 million subscribers (Updated)

Update: March 9, 2020: Deadline reports that during Disney’s annual shareholders meeting today, its CEO Bob Chapek confirmed that Disney Plus subscriber numbers have now reached the big 100 million user milestone less than 16 months since the service’s launch. The company previously predicted it would reach 60 million subscribers five years after its November 2019 launch date.

Original article: November 13, 2019: Disney Plus officially launched on Tuesday, and for a few hours, many users encountered issues with the new streaming service. Now, the company has revealed why that happened. The number of Disney Plus subscribers has already exceeded 10 million users, just one day after launch.

The statement (via The Verge) shows that the Disney Plus servers got overwhelmed by the influx of users. Today, it seems things have settled down somewhat. DownDetector currently shows over 400 reports of issues with Disney Plus. That’s still a far cry from the thousands of issues that were reported early on Tuesday.

Another report from the analyst firm Apptopia claimed the Disney Plus app on iOS and Android exceeded 3.2 million downloads on Tuesday. About 88.7 % of those downloads came from the US. The rest came from Canada (9.1%) and the Netherlands (2.2%), according to the report. While there is some margin for error, we can estimate from those app download numbers that around 8.8 million Disney Plus subscribers came from the US. By comparison, rival service Netflix currently has about 60 million US subscribers.

Disney most likely didn’t get a lot of direct revenue from those 10 million Disney Plus subscribers. Many of them certainly took advantage of the free Disney Plus offers. That includes the free year for all current and new Verizon Wireless unlimited plan users.

Some analysts predicted the number of Disney Plus subscribers would be between 10 to 18 million in its first year. Instead, the official Disney Plus subscribers number has reached the low end of estimates in just one day. Those numbers will grow on Nov. 19 when the service launches in Australia, New Zealand, and Puerto Rico.