‘House of the Dragon’ debut crashes HBO Max as millions flock to watch prequel

Streaming companies have struggled to keep up with demand for their most popular shows

22 August 2022 - 11:38 By Shiyin Chen and Christopher Palmeri
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'House of the Dragon', which arrives more than three years after the last episode of 'Game of Thrones' caused a crash on HBO Max for some users.
'House of the Dragon', which arrives more than three years after the last episode of 'Game of Thrones' caused a crash on HBO Max for some users.
Image: Bloomberg

The hotly anticipated debut of the Game of Thrones prequel saw a vast number of users flock to HBO Max, overwhelming the service for some on Sunday night in the US. 

More than 3,000 outages were reported across the global monitoring service Downdetector at 9pm in New York, just as House of the Dragon was released. 

The show is being “successfully viewed” by millions of subscribers, a representative for Warner Bros Discovery Inc, the parent of HBO, said in a statement. “We’re aware of a small portion of users attempting to connect via Fire TV devices that are having issues and are in the process of resolving for those impacted users,” the representative added.

Still, many users took to Twitter to complain about the issues.

House of the Dragon arrives more than three years after the last episode of Game of Thrones, which alone drew 19.3 million viewers, a record for HBO. The prequel is set roughly 170 years before and focuses on the Targaryen family’s bloody turmoils. 

Streaming companies have struggled to keep up with demand for their most popular shows. Earlier this year, the release of the season finale of Stranger Things sent Netflix Inc’s platform crashing. 

More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com

Bloomberg


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