Tonight's episode of Game of Thrones was the most highly anticipated of the season. The network, the showrunners, the cast and the crew all hyped the episode in the months before "Battle of the Bastards" officially hit the schedule. However, not everyone got tonight's episode on time this evening. In fact, some fans weren't able to watch the episode on time, thanks to a glitch with HBO Now.
By a "glitch," I really mean HBO Now was down, and it was down for quite some time for users. Subscribers all over the country sat down patiently at 9 p.m. EST time, expecting to catch the latest episode as they do every week, and instead they were greeted with this:
Some of the CinemaBlend staff who also subscribe to HBO Now reported problems with the service when the episode was supposed to be available. About 24 minutes into the episode, one of our writers on the East Coast finally got through and their thirst for the big battle between Jon Snow and Ramsay Bolton was finally quenched. Unfortunately, not everyone was able to get the service back that quickly. In fact, it took until 10:13 EST for HBO to confirm the service was back up and working for all devices. And in that time, a lot of crazy stuff happened on Game of Thrones.
To see how many people were affected by the HBO Now blackout, you need go no further than social media, where a variety of people cracked jokes, complained and shared fitting commentary such as this one:
Or this awesome human, who connected her sadness over not having new Game of Thrones to watch with a Harry Potter meme:
Obviously, if you were watching Game 7 and planned to hold off on catching up on Game of Thrones, you may not have been aware that this is a thing, but it's sort of amazing to know that HBO has a series that is so popular that when it isn't available exactly on time, many people on the Internet panic. I would say that it could have been much worse and HBO Now could have been down for the entire night, but I know that doesn't help all of the major fans who were ready and waiting for the biggest episode in Game of Thrones history. It was so huge, it took 25 days to shoot and more than 500 extras participated. It wasn't an episode we wanted to wait any longer for than we had to.
You can catch the Season 6 finale next Sunday at 9 p.m. ET. Hopefully, there won't be any big glitches the next time around on HBO Now.
