HBO Max crashes as ‘House Of The Dragon’ causes streamer outages

House Of The Dragon

Warner Bros. Discovery’s streamer HBO Max suffered major outages on Sunday night due to the premiere of House of the Dragon.

The series is a spin-off from HBO’s iconic Game of Thrones, and has been one of the brand’s most hotly-anticipated launches in years.

However, the streaming app suffered technical difficulties – particularly for users of Amazon’s Fire TV platform, with multiple users saying that the app was crashing when they tried to watch the show and others reporting stuttering and other visual problems.

HBO Max comms boss 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.”

This is not the first time that HBO Max has struggled with increased demand on the launch of high-profile content. The app crashed in its entirety ahead of the season two finale of Euphoria, while earlier iterations of the HBO app prior to its repackaging as HBO Max also struggled to handle the increased demand around the latter seasons of Game of Thrones.

WBD will point to creaky architecture as one of the reasons why it is planning to launch an entirely new streamer and app next summer, as the company gears up to combine HBO Max and discovery+ into one international DTC service next year. The Verge first reported news of HBO Max’s outage.