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FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. — In a gas station parking lot crowded with firefighters and anxious evacuees on Wednesday, a woman sat in her car and cried while watching wildfire smoke spew across her neighborhood.

“I’m not ready for this,” she said as she and her neighbors waited for word of their homes near Flagstaff, Ariz. “Not this early.”

Wind-driven springtime wildfires are tearing through parched evergreens and brush across Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado, burning scores of homes and forcing thousands of people to flee during a fire season that is growing longer and more destructive as climate change dries out the West.

In northern Arizona, the fast-moving Tunnel fire was burning through an expanse of forest and rural homes about 14 miles northeast of the college town of Flagstaff. The fire, whose cause is under investigation, swelled to more than 19,700 acres by Wednesday and had destroyed 25 buildings, according to a spokesman for the Coconino County Sheriff’s Office.

The fire was zero percent contained on Wednesday afternoon, and there were no reports of deaths or injuries.

The Tunnel fire is one of several blazes that have erupted across the West in recent weeks, fueled by chaotic winds, a deepening yearslong drought and an acute scarcity of spring rain or snow.

“We used to have the fire season,” said Don Falk, a professor in the school of natural resources at the University of Arizona, which is in Tucson. “That’s an obsolete concept. Fire season is 12 months.”

In New Mexico, a recent wildfire killed two people and burned 200 buildings around Ruidoso. A wind-driven blaze burning uncontained in the national forest outside of Prescott, Ariz., swelled to 1,600 acres by Wednesday. And in Colorado, fire crews in Boulder, where a winter grass fire destroyed more than 1,000 homes, spent the past week racing to tamp down several smaller fires.

In all, more than 2,300 firefighters across the West are currently fighting fires and about 830,000 acres have already been charred this year, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. In Arizona alone, more than 500 firefighters are battling the two largest blazes.

“Everybody is out on these fires,” said Tiffany Davila, a spokeswoman for the Arizona Department of Forestry and Fire Management.

The winds hampered efforts to contain the Tunnel fire by grounding firefighting flights on Tuesday. Conditions were somewhat better on Wednesday, but fire officials said the winds across northern Arizona were expected to gust to 50 miles an hour on Thursday and Friday.

Forecasters also warned that high winds and dry conditions would make the next few days perilous across the Southwest. The National Weather Service in Boulder issued a warning about extreme fire danger stretching from southern Arizona and New Mexico up the flank of the plains of eastern Colorado.

Officials said that the Tunnel fire did not pose an immediate threat to Flagstaff, home to Northern Arizona University and about 77,000 residents, and that they were hopeful the winds would continue pushing it toward thinly populated areas. The fire forced the closure of the Sunset Crater Volcano and Wupatki National Monuments, scattering park workers who said they did not know how long they would be displaced.

Residents said they had barely paid heed to the small fire when it was first reported on Sunday and they saw smoke rising against the backdrop of the San Francisco Peaks. But by midday Tuesday, they were scrambling to escape a curtain of flames and smoke after the wind kicked up and brought the fire tearing through their horse corrals and two-acre yards.

“It was like driving to Mordor,” said Amber Randall, who raced home from a work appointment in Sedona, about an hour away, while her assistant rescued dogs and cats and an expensive drawing owned by David Bowie from her home. “There was no time. No time.”

By Wednesday afternoon, the winds were gathering new strength as Carla Chiquito, 51, and her family sat in the parking lot of a gas station just outside the boundaries of the mandatory evacuation zone. Her husband had stayed behind, dousing the yard with a hose after a neighbor’s house burned to the ground.

Lisa Bishop pulled up with a livestock trailer, hoping to return some of her animals to her home after the flames tore through her neighborhood in the Timberline-Fernwood community, which had sustained the worst damage.

She said she had not worried much about the threat of fire. The area around her burned in a huge blaze a dozen years ago, but she felt protected by a highway that stood between her home and the forest.

But on Tuesday afternoon, the fire leaped across that road and charged into her neighborhood. Ms. Bishop and other neighbors raced to get their livestock and pets into trailers and carriers before fleeing.

“It looked like hell,” she said. “It was the scariest thing we’ve ever seen.”

KOSICE, Slovakia — He lived with his sick mother and never had a regular job. He had no obvious source of income and, according to his uncle, even signed up for welfare benefits as a caregiver deserving of state support.

But Bohus Garbar, down-on-his-luck and in his early 50s, still managed to donate thousands of euros to Kremlin-friendly, far-right political parties in Slovakia. He also worked for free as a contributor to an anti-establishment website notorious for recycling Russian propaganda.

Family and friends are mystified.

“He definitely wasn’t in a state where he could support any political party,” said Mr. Garbar’s uncle, Bohuslav Garbar, a retired computer programmer in the family’s hometown of Kosice, 50 miles from Slovakia’s eastern border with Ukraine.

A Slovak security service surveillance video, made public in early March, provides at least the start of an explanation: it shows his nephew receiving instructions and two 500-euro bills, a small part of what officials say were tens of thousands of euros in payments, from a Russian military intelligence officer masquerading as a diplomat at Moscow’s embassy in Bratislava, the Slovak capital.

“I told Moscow that you are such a good boy,” the Russian spy, Sergei Solomasov, can be heard telling his Slovak recruit before explaining that Moscow would like Mr. Garbar to act as a “hunter” on the prowl for people of influence willing to cooperate with Russia.

For years, European intelligence agencies have sounded the alarm over the clandestine activities of Russian spies, while regarding with suspicion those who cheerlead for Russia and its president, Vladimir V. Putin. Moscow routinely dismissed this as paranoid “Russophobia,” its catchall response to nearly all foreign criticism.

The invasion of Ukraine, accompanied by a barrage of transparent lies, however, has vindicated the darkest Western suspicions and accelerated efforts to uproot hidden networks of spies and their recruits.

Slovakia, a small Slavic nation with a strongly pro-Western government but also large reserves of genuine, homegrown sympathy for Russia, shows in microcosm how the Kremlin has sought to win influence and sow discord on Europe’s formerly communist eastern fringe by leveraging spies, paid helpers, far-right nationalists and disinformation-spouting media.

“We always suspected this was happening, but now we have a smoking gun,” said Daniel Milo, director of an Interior Ministry unit responsible for monitoring and countering disinformation. “This is a clear example of how the Russians operate.”

Mr. Garbar, he added, “is just the tip of the iceberg. We don’t know yet how many other Garbars are out there running around.”

The video of Mr. Garbar’s rendezvous with Mr. Solomasov, the Russian spy, was recorded last year by Slovakia’s military intelligence agency as part of a long investigation. Mr. Solomasov was expelled early last month, among more than 30 Russian diplomats recently sent home from Bratislava, as well as scores more from other European capitals.

Mr. Garbar, arrested and charged with espionage and bribe-taking, has been released from detention pending his trial. The former vice-rector of Slovakia’s military academy was also charged with betraying his country to Russia for money.

Officials say both have confessed and are now cooperating with investigators.

“They are talking and talking and talking and this has to make the Russian network in Slovakia very nervous,” Jaroslav Nad, the defense minister, said in an interview.

Russia has not commented on Mr. Garbar’s liaison with Russian military intelligence, but it called the expulsion of Mr. Solomasov “groundless.”

Russia’s push for influence, officials say, kicked into high gear after its 2014 annexation of Crimea and initial invasion of eastern Ukraine, generating a flood of Russian disinformation in Slovakia and across the region. Friendly outlets routinely portray Russia as a champion of peace and lodestar of Christian values, while casting NATO as a warmongering menace.

In a survey released last year by Globesec, a Bratislava research group, more than half of those surveyed in Slovakia said they viewed Mr. Putin positively, compared with just 12 percent in neighboring Poland and 13 percent in Lithuania.

If an unlikely enabler, Mr. Garber proved a valuable conduit who donated large sums of money to nationalist parties enamored with Moscow. One beneficiary was the ultranationalist politician Marian Kotleba, who was given a six-month suspended jail sentence this month and stripped of his seat in Parliament for using Nazi-themed symbols.

After winning election as a regional governor in 2013, Mr. Kotleba put up a banner outside his office: “Yankees go home! STOP NATO!”

Official records show that Mr. Garbar donated 10,000 euros to Mr. Kotleba’s xenophobic party ahead of parliamentary elections in 2016, making him its second biggest donor. Mr. Kotleba’s campaign slogans for that election included “For Slavic brotherhood, against a war with Russia!” In 2018, Mr. Garbar donated a further 4,500 euros to one of Mr. Kotleba’s pro-Russian partner parties.

Investigators have also examined Mr. Garbar’s work as an unpaid contributor and translator for Hlavne Spravy, or Main News. Slovak authorities shut down the website, which calls itself a “conservative daily,” in early March for unspecified “harmful activity,” shortly after the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

It still operates, in a reduced form, on Facebook, which Victor Breiner, an adviser to the Slovak defense minister, described as “the main arena now for Kremlin propaganda.”

In the weeks before Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine, Main News often echoed Kremlin talking points, mocking American warnings of a coming attack on Ukraine as “hysteria without end” and instead blaming NATO for rising tensions.

Robert Supko, the founder and editor of Main News, which he runs from his apartment in Kosice, scorned the security service video — first published by a rival and liberal-leaning media outlet, Dennik N — as a “spy parody” and said he knew nothing of his unpaid helper’s paid work for Russian military intelligence. “We were all very surprised by it, everybody who knows him,” he said in an interview.

Mr. Supko said he set up Main News after attending an anti-abortion protest in 2012 that mainstream media outlets all ignored. Without alternative news sources, he decided, “our opinions, the Christian-conservative view, will be pushed out from the public space completely.” Russia, he added, “is more normal” than the liberal West.

He denied taking money himself from Russia other than what he said were payments of around 600 euros to cover the cost of ads that the Russian embassy had placed on his site.

Mr. Supko contended that Main News was not overly pro-Russian, though he conceded that “maybe we rooted a little bit more for Russia” to counter what he called “American propaganda” published elsewhere. He also acknowledged that his staff had for four years included Yevgeny Palcev, a Russian resident of Slovakia with ties to state media in Moscow, who wrote fiercely pro-Kremlin articles for the website under a pseudonym.

They parted ways in 2018. “We liked Russia, but not like that. Not that much,” Mr. Supko recalled.

He said he had known Mr. Garbar for thirty years and insisted that his old friend only wrote occasional articles about China. Officials say otherwise. “He was very much involved in writing about lots of things other than China” and spreading “classic Russia propaganda narratives,” said Mr. Nad, Slovakia’s defense minister.

Miroslava Sawiris, an expert on disinformation and adviser to the Slovak government’s Security Council, said the Main News website was “quite sophisticated and did not just spew nonsense.” She said “openly pro-Kremlin” stories accounted for only around 20 percent of the content but achieved unusual reach and influence because of the site’s popularity.

In recent years, as the far right surged in Europe, Main News became what Matej Kendrik, the director of the Strategic Policy Institute, a Slovak research group, described as “the hegemon” in the “media family of alternative news and conspiracy theories.”

It was particularly influential, for example, in stoking fierce opposition early this year to a proposed defense pact between Slovakia and the United States. The pact, which was finally approved by the Slovak Parliament shortly before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, “activated all the pro-Russian players” in a “massive anti-America reaction,” said Michal Trnka, the chief executive of Gerulata Techologies, a Bratislava company focused on data analysis.

Like many other Russia-friendly media outlets, Main News was thrown off balance by Mr. Putin’s onslaught against Ukraine and struggled for several days to explain it. Mr. Supko said he and his staff had decided that Russia should be criticized just as “we criticized America’s imperialist wars,” but by then their site was shut down.

In the video of his meeting with the Russian spy, Mr. Garbar explains that finding useful people to work for Moscow could be difficult because those who support Russia tend to be marginal types with no real influence or access to information.

“There are many people who are pro-Russian but they are irrelevant,” Mr. Garbar warned Mr. Solomasov, adding, “They’d give you nothing.”

Mr. Garbar’s uncle said he was mystified that his nephew, who was always fascinated by American culture, particularly heavy metal bands like Metallica, would ever get entangled with Russia. “This whole Russian thing is very strange. He must have gotten into some sort of environment where something happened,” he said.

Ms. Sawiris, the government expert on disinformation, said she did not know what had happened to Mr. Garbar, but worries that “there is no limit to the impact propaganda can have on the human mind, as we now see in Russia.” Since Russia invaded Ukraine, she added, “the curtain has now fallen and lots of things have become obvious.”

Miroslava German Sirotnikova contributed reporting from Bratislava.

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Good evening. Here’s the latest at the end of Wednesday.

The Russian Defense Ministry said the new missile could deploy nuclear warheads at hypersonic speeds anywhere in the world but it needed further testing before deployment.

In Ukraine, the air force has bolstered its operations after receiving spare parts shipments coordinated by the U.S. But in the devastated city of Mariupol, citizens and soldiers sheltering in an abandoned steel plant may have only hours left before it falls. They vowed to fight until the “last drop of blood.”

President Biden met top U.S. defense officials, a day after promising to send more artillery to help Ukraine. The U.N. Secretary General, António Guterres, requested to meet with the leaders of Russia and Ukraine to discuss “urgent steps to bring about peace.”

3. President Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen, the far-right leader, debated ahead of Sunday’s French presidential election.

But what they said could matter less than how some voters feel about Macron: They hate him. A veteran political journalist called the level of loathing “unprecedented.” It stems, he thinks, from perceptions of Macron as an elitist. Le Pen herself takes every opportunity to remind voters of that as she campaigns. She referred at one rally to “words of a power without empathy.”

The televised debate was crucial for Le Pen’s long quest to build her credibility and continue softening her image. Macron was under pressure to defend a five-year record tested by a series of social and economic crises. Though polls show that Macron holds the lead, it’s possible many French voters may simply stay home.

4. New Mexico regulators faulted the producers of the movie “Rust” for the death of a cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, who was shot during a scene in which the actor Alec Baldwin had to draw a gun.

Hutchins was shot and killed on Oct. 21 when the gun, which was not supposed to be loaded with live ammunition, went off as Baldwin pointed it at the camera. Baldwin and other producers have been named in lawsuits seeking damages.

New Mexico’s Occupational Health and Safety Bureau said that the film’s producers “knew that firearm safety procedures were not being followed on set and demonstrated plain indifference to employee safety.” The agency issued a $136,793 penalty, the maximum allowed.

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5. A doctor in Ohio was acquitted of murdering his patients, who overdosed on fentanyl, the powerful opioid.

The verdict, on 14 counts, brought an end to one of the state’s largest murder cases, which set off a debate about end-of-life medical care.

The doctor, William Husel, was charged in 2019 after two hospital pharmacists raised concerns that he had been prescribing unusually high doses of fentanyl to gravely ill patients. Husel called it “comfort medication” to treat patients in severe pain. Prosecutors said he was abusing sick patients.

6. Wimbledon will bar Russian and Belarusian players from competing at this year’s tournament in London.

The ban, leveled because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Belarus’s support of the war, would make Wimbledon the first Grand Slam tennis tournament to prevent individual athletes from playing. It would exclude a number of highly ranked players, such as the Russian player Daniil Medvedev, the reigning U.S. Open men’s singles champion and No. 2 player on the ATP Tour; and Aryna Sabalenka of Belarus, who is ranked No. 4 on the women’s tour.

Wimbledon, which is scheduled to begin in late June, left open the possibility of revising its position.

7. The pandemic made New York City’s “epidemic of loneliness” even worse.

As some Covid restrictions are now finally lifted and New York returns to some semblance of normal, one unknown is the lasting effects of two years of prolonged isolation and the loneliness that came with it.

According to U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, loneliness is a public health crisis on the scale of the opioid epidemic or obesity. More people struggle with loneliness than diabetes, and it can put people at greater risk of heart disease, cancer, stroke and premature death. It can also increase the likelihood of depression and anxiety.

8. Inflation is wreaking havoc on our travel budgets. Here’s how to strategize around it.

Many of us hope to get on the road again. But rising prices, employment shortages and supply chain slowdowns are hitting the travel industry hard.

Our Frugal Traveler columnist explored flight, train, car, lodging and other travel options to help sidestep budget restrictions. Among her suggestions: a Costco membership for better rental-car deals; European rail travel for cost-effective and more environmentally friendly journeys; upgraded hostels or house-sitting instead of hotel rooms.

And #VanLife isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. A Times Magazine reporter discovered glorious Instagram photos don’t tell the full story.

9. Believe it or not, Nicolas Cage is in on the joke.

He has long had a reputation as someone who “seems to be eager at any moment to set fire to something,” our colleague Sarah Lyall writes in a profile. That version of Cage is being resurrected in “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent,” a film that both celebrates and sends up the actor.

Cage, who won an Academy Award for his role in “Leaving Las Vegas,” has appeared in more than 100 films, many of them decidedly not Oscar caliber.

10. And finally, a Washington hotel that served as an influence bazaar for Trump allies is slated to close.

During former President Trump’s four years in the White House, the sprawling lobby of the Trump International Hotel became a popular gathering spot for cabinet members, Congressional Republicans, foreign interests and others seeking access to his administration.

Regulars included Rudolph Giuliani, the former New York mayor and personal lawyer for Trump, as well as Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s onetime campaign manager.

The hotel is being sold for $375 million to a Florida investment group that will take down the Trump name and rebrand it as a Waldorf Astoria.

Have a high-powered evening.

Hannah Yoon compiled photos for this briefing.

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Here are today’s Mini Crossword, Spelling Bee and Wordle. If you’re in the mood to play more, find all our games here.

April 20, 2022: This article has been updated to include information about the Department of Justice’s filing notice to appeal to reinstate the transportation mask mandate.

When a federal judge struck down the mandate for mask wearing on planes, buses and other modes of public transportation on Monday, most major airlines wasted no time in ending their requirements. Passengers even cheered midflight when they were told they could take off their masks. The science on masking did not change this week, yet public health experts and policymakers are now forced to acknowledge what many will no longer do to protect others.

The Department of Justice filed notice to appeal the ruling after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that extending the mask requirement is necessary. But it’s unclear how long the mandate would remain in place if reinstated, as it was already set to expire on May 3.

It’s an unfortunate reality that mask mandates, and masks themselves, have become politicized and unpopular for many. It’s why several governors and businesses rolled back requirements long before coronavirus case numbers dropped, and it is likely why airlines were also quick to do so. These groups have interests that compete with science. Members of the public who want to live as they did in 2019 can sway those groups if they are loud enough, even if they’re not the majority.

But the fact is that despite a desire to live as if Covid were no longer a threat, the United States does not have enough protections in place to do so right now. The interventions that make it safer to live normally again, like access to testing and drugs to treat Covid, are not equitably available to everyone. Vaccination and booster rates are not where they should be.

This pandemic is not over. A new variant could emerge at any time, and cases are rising in some parts of the country. Too many people are, according to the C.D.C., still at risk. The judge’s ruling may argue that the organization has exceeded its statutory authority, but that doesn’t mean that we’re out of the woods.

It’s not yet time to give up on measures that might protect the public and make places and activities safer for those who cannot protect themselves. But instead of continuing to bicker about things that have become hopelessly politicized like mask mandates, those in public health could focus on efforts that might make much more of a difference. One way forward is to identify and vocally get behind policies and tools with potentially higher impact and lower risk of backlash.

One of the most important is getting better ventilation in many buildings across the country. Too many don’t have filtration capabilities to remove infectious particles from the air, and too many aren’t of high enough quality to prevent spread.

Another policy that was important before Covid but is now imperative involves robust sick leave. Too many Americans are fearful of staying home if they’re ill, afraid to lose income or, even worse, employment. The American work culture still values toughing it out, and campaigns are needed to explain that this is not only misguided but also dangerous.

The law also needs to support better work accommodations for those truly still at increased risk, especially the immunocompromised. Some people may need to work from home; others may not be able to work at all. They and even some of their caregivers may need extra support as long as risk from Covid exists.

It is intolerable that disparities in the health care system still exist that prevent Covid-19 treatments from being equitably available to all. Making them free is necessary but not sufficient. The testing, prescription and sourcing need to be easily accessible for everyone, and yet many of those who need the most help are struggling to get it.

Cajoling has gotten the United States as far as it’s going to get on immunizations. Mandates work, but they’ve become politically toxic as well. America’s public health apparatus needs to get much more innovative with vaccination campaigns. Health workers could go out into communities door to door or where people work or spend their time and could offer them immediate immunization. We could do better at explaining how vaccines are free, safe and easily received. Public health departments should train a legion of trusted voices within different populations to help with the effort.

When Covid-19 came to my university and many others, we didn’t put the onus of risk management on students, faculty and other staff members. We invested in public health infrastructure; built labs to test for Covid locally; made testing easy; ran on-site vaccination clinics; increased Covid leave time for quarantine, isolation and even vaccine side effects; and shifted to work-at-home policies when appropriate.

Our success also depended on communicating extensively, so people knew what we were doing and why, especially if the policies we were adopting were unpopular. We were clear that when coronavirus cases rose sharply, as they did in January, we might need to increase protections, like requiring masks in all indoor spaces. When things got much safer, we ended our mask mandate in March. But the institutional interventions continued, and we have a high level of vaccination, at over 90 percent.

Committing to large-scale efforts that are less contentious and more effective seems like an easy choice. We spend too much time fighting one another and not enough time fighting the pandemic. Every day we do so, everyone loses.

Many entertainment executives, tired of playing catch-up to a Silicon Valley interloper, have been waiting for the comeuppance of Netflix. But this may not have been the way they hoped it would happen.

Netflix said this week that it lost more subscribers than it signed up in the first three months of the year, reversing a decade of steady growth. The company’s shares nose-dived 35 percent on Wednesday while it shed about $50 billion in market capitalization. The pain was shared across the industry as the stock of companies like Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount also declined.

Netflix blamed a number of issues, ranging from increased competition to its decision to drop all its subscribers in Russia because of the war in Ukraine. To entertainment executives and analysts, the moment felt decisive in the so-called streaming wars. After years of trying, they may see a chance to gain ground on their giant rival.

But Netflix’s stunning reversal also raised a number of questions that will have to be answered in the coming months as more traditional media companies race toward subscription businesses largely modeled after what Netflix created. Is there such a thing as too many streaming options? How many people are really willing to pay for them? And could this business be less profitable and far less reliable than what the industry has been doing for years?

“They switched from a sound business model to an unsound one,” the veteran entertainment executive Barry Diller said in an interview on Wednesday, referring to many legacy companies that have recently debuted streaming options. “I would guess today they’re saying, ‘Maybe trees don’t grow to the skies.’”

The media industry, worried about declining movie theater ticket sales and broadcast television ratings, has been reshaping itself on the fly to go all-in on streaming and compete with Netflix. Disney has invested billions. Discovery Inc. and WarnerMedia completed a merger this month to better compete with streaming behemoths. CNN even introduced a streaming version of itself, which has so far drawn underwhelming interest from subscribers.

But Netflix’s sudden problems show that those investments come with a lot of risk. The streaming market may still be a giant one over the long term, but the next few years could be difficult, said Rich Greenfield, an analyst at LightShed Partners and a longtime streaming booster.

“No matter what, it looks far less profitable, and that’s a problem for everybody,” he said. Fewer subscribers coupled with increased costs because of fiercer competition to create original content mean less profit for everyone.

Another concern, some analysts say, is the so-called churn rate. Consumers are growing warier of rising prices for streaming services and becoming more likely to cancel a service when a favorite show comes to an end, said Kevin Westcott, vice chairman of the consulting firm Deloitte. According to Deloitte, 25 percent of U.S. customers have canceled a streaming service only to resubscribe to it within a year.

“They’re frustrated that they have to have so many subscriptions to get all the content they want,” Mr. Westcott said.

Netflix’s issues increase pressure on Disney, which will report subscriber numbers on May 11. If Disney’s figures fail to live up to expectations, the distress signals surrounding the streaming business will grow louder.

There was also fear among Hollywood talent agents on Wednesday that the Netflix gravy train could slow and that the company’s willingness to pay whatever it took for scripts and talent deals could vanish. The same went for producers. Netflix has spent hundreds of millions of dollars over the past five years in pursuit of Academy Awards. It has yet to nab a best picture Oscar, but its commitment to prestige filmmaking has been praised.

“The effect on us will be if the new reality forces them to cut back on their $17 billion-a-year programming budget,” said Michael Shamberg, whose four-part documentary on the Three Mile Island nuclear plant crisis will debut on Netflix next month. “As a producer, I always think of them as a first stop for pitching original ideas. If their subscriber growth levels off and it forces them to cut back on programming, will they stop taking risks on innovative TV shows and Oscar films?”

Netflix acknowledged that ferocious competition was partly a reason that growth had stalled. The company used to say its primary competition was not from other streaming services but from diversions like sleep and reading.

Now there is a question about whether Netflix’s original content is strong enough to set it apart, as even deeper-pocketed companies like Apple and Amazon continue to increase their spending on critically acclaimed shows like “Severance,” which is carried on Apple TV+, and the upcoming first season of a “Lord of the Rings” prequel, for which Amazon is said to be spending more than $450 million.

“The reality is with so much alternative content out there, where is the new stuff that is just crushing it? Where are the new franchises?” asked Mr. Greenfield, the analyst. He noted that popular shows like “Ozark,” “Stranger Things” and “The Crown” would soon be ending their runs.

Indeed, interest in Netflix’s vast library has been showing signs of plateauing.

“For every single title on the Netflix catalog, the demand is pretty much flat,” said Alejandro Rojas, the vice president of applied analytics at Parrot Analytics, a research firm. “The catalog for HBO Max and Disney+ is growing double digits. That’s a big difference.”

Netflix’s performance could also cause rivals to reconsider their own international expansion plans, potentially making more targeted efforts overseas. Netflix’s subscriptions declined not just in the United States and Canada but also in Europe and Latin America.

“Netflix has thrown the kitchen sink at this,” the industry analyst Michael Nathanson said. “They were a first mover, they spent a ton on content, and they are making more localized content. They’ve done the right things, and yet they’ve hit a wall.”

Netflix executives, normally self-assured, seemed notably unsteady on Tuesday, when the first-quarter results were released. The co-chief executive Reed Hastings, who once swore there would never be ads on Netflix, said the company would consider introducing a lower-priced, advertising-supported tier in the next year or two. Netflix also said it would crack down on password sharing, a practice that in the past it said it had no problem with.

“We’ve been thinking about that for a couple of years, but when we were growing fast it wasn’t a high priority to work on,” Mr. Hastings said. “And now, we’re working superhard on it.”

Netflix has no advertising sales experience, while rivals like Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount have vast advertising infrastructure. And the password crackdown led some analysts to wonder whether Netflix has already reached market saturation in the United States.

Mr. Hastings tried to reassure everyone that Netflix had been through tough times before and that it would solve its problems. He said the company was now “superfocused” on “getting back into our investors’ good graces.”

Brooks Barnes contributed reporting.