Disney+ Users Are Furious After Hacked Accounts Lead to Customer Service Headaches

With 1.5 billion people around the globe being asked (or told) to go into self-isolation in order [...]

By Christian Long

With 1.5 billion people around the globe being asked (or told) to go into self-isolation in order to slow the spread of coronavirus, people have been turning to streaming services to help stave off the boredom. Although it hasn't always been smooth sailing for subscribers.

Hulu had a brief outage last week, as did DirectTV, and some companies are even temporarily lowering their video quality so as not to overload their servers -- including Disney+. Now, it appears that there's another issue with the Disney-centric streamer: a number of accounts being hacked and right after a surge in new users, too. Some of the complaints about the matter go back a number of days, it does seem like there has been an influx of users logging in to air their grievances. Along with the obvious problem of not being able to spend hours getting lost in Disney's massive catalog, the fact that users' credit card information is attached has made them question their overall security.

To make matters worse, customer service doesn't appear to be resolving many of their complaints, leading to long phone calls in addition to the headache of dealing with stolen credit card data. So, their frustrations were let out on Twitter.

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This isn't the first time Disney+ has had to deal with this exact problem. Just days after its launch in November, several users reported the same thing.

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The company claimed there was no evidence of a security breach at the time, and added that "billions of usernames and passwords leaked from previous breaches at other companies, pre-dating the launch of Disney+, are being sold on the web."

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As a result of self-quarantining, signups for the service between Saturday, March 14 and Monday, March 16 reportedly tripled when compared to the same timeframe the week prior, making Disney+ the fastest-growing streaming service at the moment.

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Along with the uptick in Disney+ subscribers, a number of streaming services have ramped up their free content to make the era of social isolation a little more tolerable.

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As far as them slowing down the streaming quality, Kevin Mayer, Walt Disney Company's Chairman of Direct-to-Consumer And International said they're "proactively instituting measures to lower our overall bandwidth utilization by at least 25% in all of the markets launching Disney+ on March 24th."

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"In the coming days, we will be monitoring Internet congestion and working closely with Internet service providers to further reduce bitrates as necessary to ensure they are not overwhelmed by consumer demand," Mayer continued.

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