Game of Thrones was back on the air on Sunday evening, or at least tried to be. Die-hard fans of the series were on the edge of their seats watching The House of the Dragon with frustration and annoyance as the HBOMax streaming platform had a major outage.
The series is a prequel, and takes place about 200 years prior to the Game of Thrones stories. Thousands of people complained that they weren’t able to access the show.
According to the website DownDetector.com, there were about 3,000 reports in less than an hour Sunday night from people unable to stream the first episode.
HBO was aware of the problem and released a statement. HBO’s Chris Willard said, “House of the Dragon is being successfully viewed by millions of HBO Max subscribers this evening. 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 show stars Paddy Considine, Emma D’Arcy, Matt Smith, Olivia Cooke, Rhys Ifans, Steve Toussaint, Eve Best, Sonoya Mizuno, and Fabien Frankel. It will chronicle the murky history of the Targaryen House.
The show will highlight the conflicts over who will inherit the throne as the king retires his rule, and the family conflicts that led them to war.
Based on author George R.R. Martin‘s prequel “Fire & Blood,” the new HBO series takes place 172 years prior to the the birth of Daenerys Targaryen, so don’t expect to see her.
The finale will stream on October 23, hopefully successfully.
Speaking of HBO, they recently merged HBOMax and Warner Brothers’ Discovery+ and laid off 70 employees to cut costs. The plan is to save $3 billion post-merger.