House of the Dragon premiere crashes HBO Max channel

We always knew that House of the Dragon - the recently released Game of Thrones prequel - was going to be popular. 

So much so, the premiere of the series actually crashed HBO Max’s platform.

The debut saw an overwhelming number of visitors heading to the streaming service on Sunday night (21 August) in the US.

Users reported up to 3,000 outages on the worldwide monitoring system, Downdetector, at 9pm in New York when the series was released.

Many who were affected by the outage took to Twitter to share their frustration.

“I’d love to watch it,” said @thewithrowshow of their desire to catch up with the newest Game of Thrones release, “but the app HBO MAX keeps crashing.”

Another penned of the app mishap: “Imagine literally paying for HBO Max just for it to crash as soon as House of the Dragon comes out, My dad is on the verge of a breakdown,” while someone else added: “@HBOMaxHelp App only crashes when I try to watch #HouseoftheDragon tonight. 

“This is unreal. Never happened before. I can watch EVERY other show/movie. ‘Intro trailer about Hbo max shows, Listen to HOTD Podcast, and then crash,’” the user reported.

However, Warner Bros Discovery Inc, who owns HBO, stated that the show has been ‘successfully viewed’ by millions of subscribers despite the user-reported issues.

The representative of the company 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 series dropped more than three years after the final episode of Game of Thrones, which garnered 19.3 million viewers alone and broke records for HBO.

The prequel takes place around 170 years before the start of the original series and focuses on the dramas within the Targaryen family.

The series allowed fans of the long-running HBO show a chance to become immersed once again within the fantasy world and, for many, the chance for the show to regain some respect after the divisive final series.

Set hundreds of years before the events of Game of Thrones, the series stars Paddy Considine as King Viserys Targaryen and Emma D'Arcy as Princess Rhaenyra Targaryen, as well as Smith, Rhys Ifans, Steve Toussaint, Eve Best and Sonoya Mizuno.

The opening episode introduced fans to a number of this series' players, but it was Smith that left fans talking for one scene in particular.

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