Up until now, HBO Now has been mostly a success, although the choice to initially restrict HBO’s standalone streaming service to Apple TV was met with consternation. Limiting the audience meant that the HBO Now service never found itself utterly overwhelmed. It was never once plagued by complaints of crashing and failure, unlike HBO Go, which was famous for it.
That is, until last night. With HBO Now fully available across all platforms and a growing subscriber base, last night’s apex episode of Game of Thrones’ sixth season, “Battle of the Bastards,” drew in so many viewers that the system reached its limit, and crashed.
Perhaps more damning, though, was the slow response from the network. As you can guess, the crashing began about 8:57 pm EST, which is when the stream goes live. But note the timestamp on HBO Now’s first tweet acknowledging the problem.
We're aware members are experiencing technical difficulties tonight. We hope to resolve this ASAP. Please follow @hbonowhelp for updates.
— HBO NOW (@hbonow) June 20, 2016
That did not go over well.
So when did the problem resolve itself? According to HBO, at around 10:12 p.m. That’s 12 minutes after the episode ended, which meant that frustrated viewers probably had the opportunity to download the episode from pirate sites before the official version was available on HBO Now.
We are pleased to confirm that successful streaming has resumed across all devices.
— HBO NOW (@hbonow) June 20, 2016
If you still experience trouble, please DM @HBONOWhelp.
Despite this, the Twitter account continued to be pelted with complaints for the next few hours, none of which it seems to have acknowledged. Still, that HBO Now made it this far before having its first major failure is not too shabby. Here’s hoping that by Game of Thrones Season 7, the network has managed to work out this issues.
And now, we present: the internet getting angry over the crash of HBO Now:
https://twitter.com/carolynelaineXD/status/744703256971120640