By Jonathan Easton

Netflix’s Korean original series Squid Game has become its biggest ever launch, the streamer has revealed.

Via its Netflix Geeked Twitter account, the company said that the survival thriller series was watched by 111 million global accounts in its first 17 days of availability.

The series was also the first Netflix original to surpass 100 million account streams in its first 28 days on the streamer.

A spokesperson confirmed to The Verge that the figures are based on the number of accounts that watched the series for at least two minutes.

Squid Game has reached the number 1 position on Netflix’s ‘top 10’ in all 94 countries where the streamer features the chart. Its 21-plus days atop the chart in the US is a record for a title not in the English language.

The show has proved to be a phenomenon both abroad and at home in South Korea. Such is the show’s popularity that telco SK Broadband has sued Netflix over a surge in traffic. Netflix has become South Korea’s second-largest data traffic generator after YouTube, with its traffic jumping by 24 times since May 2018 to a September 2021 total of 1.2 trillion bits of data processed per second.