Netflix beat earnings, did its biggest buyback and then restricted access to its engagement data and fell 12% through two days.

Netflix reported its Q2 2026 earnings on Thursday night and by Friday morning the stock was down as much as 12.2% before closing off around 8%, near $68 a fresh 52-week low. This is a stock that traded at $127 within the past year and now is at half its value.

Netflix actually reported that the revenue grew 13.4% to $12.56 billion (as estimated by Wall Street). Profit was slightly above expectations. The company bought back $4.7 billion of its own stock during the quarter, the largest buyback in its history, with $27 billion more approved. Its advertising business is on track to roughly double to $3 billion this year.

So, then two things happened, first Netflix told investors to expect about $12.86 billion in revenue next quarter, roughly 11.7% growth. Wall Street wanted $13 billion, about 13%, the difference between growing 13% and growing 11.7%. For a stock that's spent years priced as a premium growth story, the investors treat slowing growth itself as bad. This is the second quarter in a row the growth number has come down.

Second, Netflix announced it will now publish its viewer engagement data only once per year. How many hours people actually spend watching is the most important health metric for a streaming service. It drives everything, ad revenue, pricing power, whether people cancel. Netflix's viewing hours grew just 2% in the first half of the year, which is slow. The company insisted that engagement is healthy and then reduced how often anyone gets to check.

So, on one side this is a mature company being repriced correctly, growth is fading and management just made it harder to track the metric that matters most, which tells you what you need to know. The other side is that the market just cut a wildly profitable, still-growing company nearly in half because growth slowed by a little over one percentage point.

So which case looks heavier.