https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/v74nna/youtube-netflix-slowing-services-download-speeds-coronavirus

As millions of Americans hunker down to slow the spread of COVID-19, gaming, teleconferencing, and video streaming are putting added stress on the internet. And while telecom executives tell Motherboard the U.S. internet will likely weather the storm, many content providers are taking extra precautions to make sure that’s true.

Responding to demands from European regulators, Netflix late last week announced that it would be slowing down customer bit rates to reduce overall network traffic by 25 percent to help avoid any potential congestion. The company already offers tools to help users on slow or capped broadband connections reducing their overall bandwidth use. "We immediately developed, tested and deployed a way to reduce Netflix’s traffic on these networks by 25%—starting with Italy and Spain, which were experiencing the biggest impact,” Netflix said. “Within 48 hours, we’d hit that goal and we’re now deploying this across the rest of Europe and the UK.” The company said most users wouldn’t notice a reduction in quality. Disney announced in a blog post that it would also be “instituting measures to lower our overall bandwidth utilisation by at least 25%” across Europe. A company representative told Motherboard the company had no such plan for the United States at this time. In a blog post, content delivery network (CDN) Akamai said the company was working with both Sony and Microsoft to slow game downloads during peak usage hours to help manage any additional demand. The slowdowns will only impact game downloads and will only appear in areas dealing with significant overall congestion. "In regions where demand is creating bottlenecks for customers, we will be reducing gaming software downloads at peak times, completing the downloads at the normal fast speeds late at night," Akamai CEO Tom Leighton said.