by Thinus Ferreira
Disney's Disney+ video streaming service abruptly went down in South Africa on Tuesday afternoon and making it inaccessible to subscribers, only displaying a "Something went wrong" and "error json input" message on the landing screen.
Disney+ subscribers in South Africa complained that they received no help or assistance from Disney+ during the service outage and no explanation as to what went wrong.
"India Hotstar. More like Hotmess," remarked one angry Disney+ SA subscriber, referring to India's Hotstar who is responsible for the badly done technical side of the Disney+ app being used in South Africa and which is apparently a much worse version that the Disney+ app used in the United States and elsewhere in the world.
"Yo, Disney+, what's up with your service today?" asked another Disney+ South African subscriber. "Json error on all platforms when trying to stream anything. Ya'll aware of any issues?"
At 15:00 on Tuesday afternoon Nick de Bruyne said he notified Disney+ SA earlier in the day about the problem and that Disney+ was still down.
"Do you want to call me too, or should I just put you straight on to my son who had to go watch Netflix instead after I had to explain to him that it's not working ... again."
Disney+ SA subscriber Martin Stabbrey said "Disney+ crashed in South Africa. Keep getting this error trying to play anything and through three different streaming services. Rebooted countless times."
Another said: "I was watching fine one moment, next moment this error popped up. When I click retry, same error. When I click help, I get an access denied error".
At the time of publication, Disney PR hasn't yet responded to a media query with any answer asking why Disney+ went down in South Africa.
UPDATE 16:05: Disney PR says "We experienced a brief technical issue that resulted in the Disney+ app
temporarily being down. It was quickly identified and resolved. We apologise
for the inconvenience to our subscribers."
