Netflix will edit its surprise hit, Squid Game, after scenes featuring phone numbers from real people was accidentally included in the show.
A man from South Korea’s Gyeonggi Province was bombarded with around 4,000 calls a day after his phone number was revealed in the first episode of the series. The number was featured on multiple business cards, handed out by a mysterious man to multiple characters, inviting them to participate in the cutthroat survival game.
As The South China Morning Post report, some viewers were calling the number out of curiosity, registering their interest to “be in the game.”
“It has come to the point where people are reaching out day and night due to their curiosity. It drains my phone’s battery and it turns off,” the man said. “At first, I didn’t know why, then my friend told me that my number came out [in the series].”
Squid Game, which debuted on September 17th, was the No. 1 Netflix show in the world following its release. Netflix co-chief executive Ted Sarandos said there was “a very good chance it’s going to be our biggest show ever.”
The popularity of Squid Game led to South Korean internet provider SK Broadband suing Netflix following a significant surge in traffic.
In their claim, SK notes that Netflix is the country’s second-largest data traffic generator after Google’s YouTube, but the two sites are the only ones to not pay network usage fees that other firms (such as Amazon, Apple, and Facebook) are paying.
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Netflix’s data traffic handled by SK reportedly jumped 24 times from May 2018 to 1.2 trillion bits of data processed per second as of September, following the success of several Korean Netflix productions including Squid Game and D.P.
