HBO’s website couldn’t handle the influx of visitors to the company’s website on Sunday, thanks to the premiere of the seventh season of Game of Thrones. Viewers who flocked to the network’s main website were greeted with an error message as people overwhelmed the site’s servers in anticipation of the season premiere.
The website issues were resolved by the middle of the first episode on the East Coast.
HBO Now users also had trouble logging into the streaming service during the first half of the episode. The episode became available to viewers across the country at the same time, 9 pm EST. Viewers who couldn’t get the show to load were greeted with a loading bar, while others complained that the service kept buffering and made the episode unwatchable.
The Hollywood Reporter was told that Latin America experienced outages on Sunday, but that the network hadn’t suffered widespread issues on HBO Go or HBO Now.
The seventh season opened up with several big events, with Jon Snow declared King of the North, Cersei remaining Queen while Jamie struggles to deal with his son’s death in the final episode of Season 6. The episode also brought Daenerys to her family’s home, finally making the travel to Westeros.
Game of Thrones will have a shortened seventh season before the final season premieres.
The outages suffered, although denied by an HBO spokesperson, will hopefully be resolved before the second episode airs on Sunday. Fans of the show showed their displeasure on Twitter, with pictures of their screen buffering or the never-ending loading bar.
The last time HBO Now suffered such a long outage was during the sixth season of Game of Thrones during the “Battle of the Bastards” episode. HBO Go last suffered problems during the premiere of season four. HBO Go didn’t suffer the same outages on Sunday evening as HBO Now did, according to reports.
