HBO apologizes for HBO Now not being available during Game of Thrones (correction)

Last night, HBO aired one of the biggest Game of Thrones episodes ever. It was so big, that Polygon's Ben Kuchera said it made up for just about every disappointing moment that's occurred in the series over the course of the past six seasons. It was comparable to the momentous Purple Wedding episode that aired during the show's fourth season, which saw the death of everyone's favorite character to hate, King Joffrey.

Those using cable boxes, and those streaming through the cable subscription-based HBO Go service, would have been able to watch the show no problem. For cord cutters hoping to catch it using HBO's other streaming service, HBO Now, luck was not on their side. Now users noticed that the service was down just as Game of Thrones was starting and weren't able to access it again until a good ten minutes after the episode had finished.

HBO apologized on Twitter for the outage, citing an overload of the network from subscribers as the reason the service failed in the first place. This isn't the first time, however, that HBO has had to apologize for a service not being available during a popular show. Two years ago, HBO Go was down for the majority of True Detective's season finale. In the past, Game of Thrones fans have also complained about HBO streaming services like Go being slow, choppy or simply inaccessible during episodes of the series, too.

HBO hasn't indicated whether it is going to look into building more servers to host the large amount of people that want to watch peak episodes, like last night's Game of Thrones, but Polygon has reached out for comment.

Correction: The author previously stated that Joffrey was killed during the Red Wedding in the third season, when it was actually the Purple Wedding in the fourth season. It was also HBO Go that wasn't available during the True Detective season one finale, not HBO Now. Changes have been made in the article.

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