Disney+ cancellation page crashes as customers rush to quit
194 comments
·September 20, 2025Aeolun
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.
kevin_thibedeau
It's more that ABC/Disney is beholden to two right-leaning broadcasters who are colluding with threats to assist in their prohibited merger that will be approved now because they just gave the felon a successful hand job. There is no indication that the ABC execs are anything more than spineless, unprincipled cowards who cave in a light breeze.
christophilus
Unless everyone at the top has been fired, ABC and Disney are not remotely aligned with the president. A short while ago, they were boycotted by the right for their slanted debate hosting and woke children’s programming.
nothrabannosir
Those two could be entirely compatible if it turns out they never gave a hoot about the actual politics, and only did all that stuff because they thought it would get them more favor with viewers, and thereby more money.
I would personally not raise an eyebrow to learn this was the case.
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.
epistasis
The FCC chair threatening your broadcast license is a pretty good "excuse". There wasn't a public outcry, it was a government outcry along with threats along multiple lines of leverage.
rdtsc
Well depending which way the wind blows. If they knew the ratings were going up and the will be large public support they could have refused, called FCC's bluff and and turned it into a publicity thing and shown the world how they are treated and such. Maybe file a lawsuit, even. But the wind wasn't blowing their way. The younger generation just doesn't watch Jimmy that much. It's social media mostly for them, so this seemed like an excuse to get rid of it. Paradoxically now that Jimmy is in the news, he is a lot more popular than in the longest time and I bet many younger kids just now heard or learned who Kimmel even is.
ummonk
It’s actually a terrible excuse as the backlash is demonstrating. Even if they were about to axe the show all along it would have been a good idea to delay that to avoid the appearance they were caving to government pressure.
OutOfHere
> The FCC chair threatening your broadcast license
That's a clear violation of the First Amendment.
bluGill
I find it hard to take that threat seriously. There would be blood on the street - real blood - americans won't stand for it. (Some will of course but enough would not that the fcc would blink)
fakeBeerDrinker
[flagged]
1oooqooq
having experience with a dictatorship first hand, all a censor does is veto milquetoast stuff.
gruez
>It was all milquetoast,
???
It was a very obvious dig at the president. There's still not good justification for the government to step in, but claiming it's "milquetoast" is baffling.
derefr
Digs directed at the President or the administration are and always have been well within the Overton window in American journalism, and previous Presidents and administrations have just seen them as a fact of life and brushed them off.
Thus “milquetoast”: an implication that any reaction to this is, objectively, an overreaction.
That the current President is a habitual over-reactor does not change that fact. It just means that you can paradoxically be taking a heterodox / outré stance by saying objectively milquetoast things.
add-sub-mul-div
Have you ever seen a late night show? Monologue jokes about the sitting president practically define the format. Every other president going back decades would just man up and take it.
djohnston
I guess it depends on the sort of media you consume. I’ve seen Destiny saying conservatives need to be afraid of getting shot, and it seems like he’s still alive.
The other people who lost jobs seemed to have said much more direct and offensive remarks than Kimmel as well.
rdtsc
He characterized the shooters as some MAGA whatever and he was presenting is a sure thing, which it still wasn't clear and it looked pretty iffy and not in line with any common sense.
FCC has and had for many years restrictions about what can be broadcast.
See https://www.fcc.gov/media/radio/public-and-broadcasting#JOUR...
> The broadcast by a station of false information concerning a crime or catastrophe violates the FCC's rules if:
> The station licensee knew that the information was false;
So we have a 1) a crime that was committed 2) misinformation
The show runners should have fought it and say that they didn't know it was false. But then now the are fighting this uphill battle having to say "hey, Jimmy's show is totally a parody, not news everyone knows that, a staffer fed Jimmy some social media quotes, whatever". At that point it's kind of a bad look anyway, so the owners decided to just shut it down.
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.
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slumpt_
It criticized the potus, and threat of his ire is enough to scare corporations in 2025. A fairly concerning development
option
Nothing. But wannabe dictator got offended
thepasswordis
[flagged]
CalChris
Not a business decision. His contract was renewed in 2022 and he had 1.77 million total viewers per night.
https://www.statista.com/chart/35165/us-late-night-show-rati...
scheeseman486
> What Kimmel Said, and the affiliates broadcasted, was a claim that Charlie Kirk’s assassin was a “maga” supporter.
This is the actual quote:
"We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it,"
Note that he doesn't say that the shooter was MAGA, only that those within the right wing influencer sphere were desperately trying to characterize the shooter as anything other than one of them. This is unambiguously and factually true.
I swear, media literacy in the united states is in the fucking toilet.
andsoitis
> MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them
> Note that he doesn't say that the shooter was MAGA
then who does the "them" refer to?
autoexec
Really, literacy in generally is tanking in the US. In 2024 over half the adults in the country couldn't even read at a sixth grade level! 21% are outright illiterate.
JumpCrisscross
> he doesn't say that the shooter was MAGA, only that those within the right wing influencer sphere were desperately trying to characterize the shooter as anything other than one of them. This is unambiguously and factually true.
I'll put it in the technically true but ambiguously misinformation category. (Which is on every metric better than what goes on at Fox.)
dismalaf
"My wife wants to go for dinner but I'd like to eat anything other than fish."
Strongly implies the wife in the sentence wants to eat fish.
Anyone with a moderate grasp of English understands what Kimmel was implying.
"Trying to characterize him as anything other than one of them". <- The implication is definitely that he's "one of them".
novemp
> There’s a relatively narrow rule which prohibits fcc licensed stations from knowing broadcasting false information if it has the possibility of creating civil unrest.
Oh wow, I didn't realize Fox News wasn't FCC-licensed.
flutas
> fcc licensed stations
Think your local K[3 letter] west of the Mississippi, W[3 letter] east of the Mississippi*.
Not "Showtime" or "HBO" or "Cartoon Network" or "CNN" or "Fox News" or "MSNBC".
That's why the affiliates started pulling it, because their license is what's on the line, not ABC/Disney directly.
*: Except for KDKA, KYW, WFAA, WBAP, WOAI, WDAY, and WNAX.
sapphicsnail
Do you not think the decision was political?
ummonk
He never said he was a MAGA supporter but that he was being claimed to be not “one of them”. Given that the shooter came from a conservative family in a conservative town and attended trade school and spent his time gaming, I think it’s reasonable to say that he was a product of the right wing milieu, and not a product of left wing indoctrination as the right alleges.
siliconc0w
He also shot the guy with his Dad's Dad's gun. It turns out that if you keep a gun around, it'll eventually be used to shoot someone.
thepasswordis
The fact that you believe this is the exact reasoning behind trying to prevent things like what Jimmy Kimmel did here.
It could not be more cut and dry than this. In fact it is so cut and dry that a conspiracy theory on both the left and the right is that the text messages demonstrating his political motivations aren’t genuine.
tcn33
what a load of bullshit.
jiggawatts
> was a claim that Charlie Kirk’s assassin was a “maga” supporter.
I just watched the video.
What he said was that MAGA supporters were too quick to blame anyone but the right, before there was any evidence about the shooter’s identity or political stance.
That’s a fact.
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thepasswordis
[flagged]
fakeBeerDrinker
[flagged]
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.
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.
AndyKelley
It can be a mixture of both. It's extremely easy to Cover Your Ass while intentionally dragging your feet when a bug works in your favor. The manager simply has to decide that other tasks are higher priority.
thierrydamiba
Call it HN’s rule: Never attribute to incompetence what can be attributed to malice
gruez
Why would any manager prioritize this when it's going to blow over in less than a day, as evidenced by other commentators saying the site is already back up?
zitterbewegung
You see this in video games. Game breaking bugs ? Next week. People can’t buy or use a skin(s) for a weapon? Less than 24 hr fix .
da_chicken
That's true, but it's seldom going to be the case that the account cancellation portion of the app is all on it's own. It's going to be built into the rest of the application, including the parts your happy customers are actually paying for. You're taking down a lot of the site.
And I don't know about others, but the one thing that's sure to make me cancel and never return is when a business tries to be a jerk about subscribers. I know one subscription service that when you try to cancel will instead ask you to pause. Except when you pause, the site will make the buttons to complete a sale begin disabled. Then 10 to 15 seconds later, the button enables. It only does this so that they can show you a request to resume your subscription. Nope. I immediately went and fully cancelled, and I haven't been back. I only intended to pause for a short time because I was unable to use the service at all for several weeks. Instead because they wanted to grasp onto every customer too tightly, and they lost me for good. They didn't respect me, so I don't want their product anymore.
nerdponx
I've often advocated for inverting Hanlon's razor whenever money is involved. The more money is at stake, the more likely it is in fact due to malice.
vlovich123
That’s the trick with capacity planning around cancellation. You can always deprioritize it because any improvement increases the speed with which revenue decreases (not valuable to the business) and customer satisfaction with this flow generally doesn’t matter since you’re losing their business. The only negative risk factor is CC chargebacks which will cost you some money but at scale most people generally don’t deal with that hassle vs just trying to cancel a few times.
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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.
bdcravens
As you acquire properties, it's almost never possible to rebuild the systems from scratch, and instead it's becomes layers upon layers of patches and quick fixes.
A fun one lately has been AT&T. We have streaming with DirecTV, and they of course share authentication with the parent AT&T. So whenever I try to login to AT&T's website to manage my wireless or fiber, it redirects and logs me into DirecTV, everytime. The only way I can manage my service is to use AT&T's mobile app.
makeitdouble
> Since the unsubscribe flows are never going to be anyone's top priority, this things happen.
This in itself makes the situation intentional.
leakycap
I appreciate this peek behind the curtain but don't share your cheer that humans being involved in the process somehow means it should get the benefit of the doubt when things like this happen.
slg
In fact, the reverse is actually quite common. The big corporation part often removes too much of the humanity from people. Too many people are comfortable making incredibly callous decisions at work because, hey, it's not their fault, they're just one small cog in the human crushing machine, and we all know what happens to bad cogs...
MonkeyIsNull
“Never attribute to malice what you can attribute to incompetence”
leakycap
This way of thinking has excused a lot of evil/malicious actions. I think it's time we actually start shining our collective flashlights at things, especially big companies, when their own systems break in ways that benefit them.
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.
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.
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.
SoftTalker
These protest boycotts never last very long. There are many large brand names that have been boycotted over the years and they are all still in business and mostly bigger than ever.
I believe Disney has been subjected to several.
boc
Boycotts are different from unsubscribing. You can boycott Chic-fil-a and then one day return, but cutting off monthly revenue streams all at once is a much different dynamic. It takes a lot to get those customers back, especially for a service that already reaches most Americans.
nitwit005
The big conglomerates are more resistant to it. Even of one of their brands becomes damaged, they have 20 others. It's hard for people to even understand all the things they own.
kjkjadksj
Look at Target’s yearly chart. Then look at Walmart’s to see where it should have been.
is_true
I've used Disney+ and I think I never used the app without experiencing some kind of issue.
ajkjk
this is probably the case, not sarcastically
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.
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.
stelliosk
Even if you're not planning to cancel, if you cancel chances are you'll get an "offer" for the next few months.
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.
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.
autoexec
I think they'd much prefer people not watch than see people enjoying the content without giving them money (often while seeding the shows to other people in the process).
If nobody watches the shows they can blame the content. If everyone clearly loves the content but refuses to give ABC/Disney/ESPN/FX their business it means the company is the problem (although that wont stop them from falling back on the lie that piracy is all about greedy people who just want everything for free)
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.
gibspaulding
As long as there’s a tpb mirror in the working half the point stands.
skatingaway
The previous poster said their VPN doesn’t work. How exactly does “the point stand” with actual evidence that it doesn’t?
jeffhollon
Can we cancel 2025?
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.
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.
null
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.